In a month of ports, we kick the show off with a showstopper. We last saw Psygnosis' first good video game back in Part 010 of the PS1 series. Now, you might be wondering two things. First, Destruction Derby was inconvenient for my joke, so I ignored it. Second, yes, Psygnosis was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony in 1996 and no, I don't know why they were allowed to put wipEout on the Saturn. Regardless of the reason why, Psygnosis could have ported all of their PS1 games on a six-month delay and it wouldn't have changed anything in the end. The upshot is that we get to see how one of the Playstation's early marquee games handles on the Saturn.
Looking back at my initial impressions a year ago, the first release of this game fit into the same pattern of big name first-holiday releases for the PS1, a lot of earned technical hype coupled with largely miserable gameplay. wipEout survived that trap better than a lot of its peers through sheer force of style, which I will reiterate still holds up. The full experience is here warts and all in this version, though I felt like I had slightly better control over my hover car with the Saturn's d-pad than on the PS1, but that could just be in my head.
I guess we now have our second-best looking Saturn racing game
It still boggles the mind why anyone would design a racing game with a Mario Kart style tournament structure where you fail out of the whole race sequence when you don't get a podium. It's more egregious when the AI drivers accrue tournament points when they finish below third, but the player gets booted entirely. I don't recall the 16-bit Nintendo racers resorting to that shenanigan, so this restriction isn't solving any kind of intractable problem. If you only have 12 or 18 tracks in your game it's ok to let players continue after finishing last, they're gonna replay the damn thing regardless. The sad part is that even with the overly floaty controls and prohibitive structure, this game is still the best futuristic racer on any 32-bit system at this point.
It took me about ten minutes after launching Iron Storm to realize I was playing a Daisenryaku game, which means we now have to unpack this whole thing. Gendai Daisenryaku was a strategy game released for PC-88 computers in 1985. The easiest way to think about it is to start with the later Famicom Wars, turn the square grid into a hex grid, and use modern day units and factions. It isn't particularly playable by our standards, and Famicom Wars would end up being a better video game in just about every way than most entries in the Daisenryaku franchise. When I call it a franchise, I'm underselling it a bit. There have been 75, and counting, releases of Daisenryaku games or off-shoots in the last 38 years. They tend to switch between modern and WWII settings and are cheap enough to produce that SystemSoft has been able to keep it going for this long relying on a niche but loyal fanbase. This might all be new to you, unless you're a meganerd, because approximately three total entries have received officially localized releases in North America. Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy is the first of those.
Before discussing the gameplay or the audiovisual experience, we have to address the subject matter. This is a WWII strategy game, which even by the mid 90's was a well saturated genre. This even included games that suspiciously flirted with Axis apologia. The thing with the Daisenryaku games is that they don't really try to hide their Japanese nationalism. Expressing that through exuberance for the JDF is one thing, which the franchise also indulges in, but expressing it through an outright celebration of the worst parts of the Imperial Era is quite another. There's been a bit of whitewashing over the decades, so I'll put a reminder here: the Japanese Empire from the death of Meiji to Hiroshima killed tens of millions of people in a genocidal rampage through east Asia, and was a state that belongs in the highest category of historical villains along with Nazi Germany and the frickin' Mongol Empire. My opinions get progressively spicier from here, so let's leave it at that.
I want everyone to take a minute and really examine this faction select screen
That goes a long way to explain the, let's say, limited appeal of the Daisenryaku franchise outside of Japan. So then, why did Working Designs decide to try their hand at importing one of these games, and why this one specifically? I have no idea, the overall game industry paid very little attention to this thing. What I do know is that they felt the need to donate $0.50 for every copy sold to the National Holocaust Museum. On one hand, that's admirable and certainly better than what SSI was doing, on the other hand that's a strong indicator of either some kind of pushback from some advocacy group or internal misgivings about the subject matter. If you're a company importing a video game with such content that you feel the need to pay off the Anti-Defamation people, maybe you shouldn't. That likely forms part of the reason why Working Designs didn't touch this franchise again. There's a lot with the content of this game that could be picked apart for its horrible imperial revisionism, but for the sake of time let's assume you know nothing about history and want to know how this thing is as a video game.
In the end it's just one of these
Without sociopolitical elements, it's fine. If anything, it plays better than Panzer General, with better designed menus and UI. Also, unlike Panzer General, the combat sequences are rendered in polygonal 3D that are kinda neat for twenty minutes before players inevitably them off. Most of the units make sense and the mission design didn't feel unfair. If you've played an Advanced Wars game, you could hop into this with minimal adjustment. Back to the polygonal sequences, those are the only interesting looking parts of the experience. I spent a decent chunk of my time with this thing thinking it was a lazy port of an MSX game or something. This is an original title for the Saturn, but it looks and sounds more primitive than the cross-gen Koei strategy games we've seen. The Daisenryaku games don't have much of anything to differentiate themselves outside of the right-wing nationalism, as far as I can tell.
I don't even want to rank this game, being tempted to just ignore its existence. Yet, I ranked Panzer General so I might as well stick it somewhere with an asterisk. At least the translation is largely competent, which is something Working Designs usually gets in trouble for, so there's that.
While we're on the topic of games that look and feel like cross-gen releases, here's what is by far the most egregious cross-gen release we have yet seen. The Earthworm Jim games are Run-and-Gun Platformers for 16-bit consoles that mark a nadir of the early 90's preteen-targeted grossitude aesthetic. I have no desire to become a scholar of youth-oriented media in the 90's, so I don't have a better descriptor than that. The titular earthworm isn't quite a Poochy type of character, nor is he that close to a Gex or Bubsy. It feels like he was born from a similar mentality to the Nickelodeon slime, except more so. I have zero affinity for this series, so let's see where we end up.
There's an aggressively immature and "hello fellow children" vibe right from the start, which I'm guessing is a continuation of nonsense from the first game. We're thrown into the opening level without much fanfare to figure it out, which was standard for 16-bit games. I would call the gameplay standard, you run, jump, and shoot. If it weren't for the brazenly terrible level design choices effusing every screen of this thing. The first level features a buttload of silhouetted foreground elements obscuring most of the action, because I guess that's what the kids were into. There's also a pig carrying puzzle mechanic that is extremely mediocre, and I guess the joke is that the pigs are heavy because they're fat…and because they’re pigs, I guess. This is clearly supposed to be a comedic game, what with the snot rope grappling hook power-up and non-sequitur sight gags, but I don't know man. I don't think I would have been amused by this junk when I was the intended age, there's just nothing to thematically latch onto.
Not seeing what's going on is totes poggers -- wait, wrong decade
On top of everything else, the actual feel of the platforming and shooting kinda sucks. I made it as far as the over-extended gag about old ladies and stairlifts in the second level, which also served as a weirdly demanding platforming challenge, and checked out. The core gameplay loop, puzzles, and minigames are all basically miserable to interact with. I don't even want to address the artstyle, audio, or gags because I'm hoping they'll go away if I ignore them. None of it is actively offensive like the previous game, it just makes me tired. I can make it through an hour of average early tactics gameplay, but after only 15 minutes I was exhausted by the puerile mediocrity of Earthworm Jim 2.
sure
Oddly enough, Earthworm Jim the brand saw more success than many contemporary also-ran video game mascots. This worm eventually wound up with four games, a comic tie-in, two season cartoon, guest appearances in other games, a toy line, and one of the more inexplicable followings I've ever seen. I can't identify what, if any, secret sauce there is in this series. Even cursory investigation shows that these things were made as explicitly cynical cash grabs by Playmates before the rights got sold around. On top of that, the series creator seems to be a massive pile of shit, the lead programmer looks like an ok guy and this could probably be left out of his resume without hurting anything, and of course Tommy Tallerico has his name on this thing. It also doesn't help that the two games after this are infamously terrible. Everything about Earthworm Jim 2 specifically and the Earthworm Jim property generally is deeply cursed.
The first of our rapid-fire check-ins with the subpar multiplatform games which littered the back end of May. We start with the most mediocre game available, Magic and Kareem's Wild Ride. We saw this thing not too long ago in Part 023 of the PS1 series and this version is about as identical as possible. After giving it a second pass, I can say with greater confidence that this game is as terrible as I initially thought. The core act of playing basketball feels terrible, and the camera angle kills all sense of depth perception, which is kinda necessary. I would say I'm glad to never have to look at this game again, but the original Slam 'n' Jam for the 3DO is out there somewhere, waiting to pounce when I least expect it.
Now we get to revisit what might be the worst 2D Fighting game of the generation, which we last saw in Part 019 of the PS1 series. The mechanical problems which condemned that version are present here, do-nothing 00-23 difficulty selector and all. The Saturn version gets the added problem of being on a system that is specifically geared towards 2D Fighting games. That puts all of the visual and control issues in even more stark relief. I mean, this game looks worse the crisper the image gets and putting this thing on the Saturn's six-button controller accentuates how bad the combo system is. I'm going to say this once and move on: PC-based Fighting games were a mistake.
This was the most painful of the batch. We last went to Wrestlemania all the way back in Part 006 of the PS1 series. At the time, it was one of the first Fighting games I had looked at for this project, and it was a breath of basic competence after suffering through Battle Arena Toshinden and Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. I thought so highly of it at the time that it had to be included in my mulligan a few weeks ago. Yet, after everything I've seen, this game just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. When it was the second 2D Fighting game released for either the PS1 or the Saturn it stood above its peers without question. Seven months and a boatload of CP System II conversions later, it doesn't stack up against most other available options. This was a real bummer of a discovery to make. Also, I think something went wrong with making the jump to the Saturn. Maybe I'm going crazy, but it felt off, like the AI had been messed with or something. Visually it's identical except for the lower quality shadows. I dunno, all these ports feel wrong somehow.
Man, Acclaim was just projectile vomiting these things, huh? We last saw this budget Soccer title in Part 018 of the PS1 series. I was up and down on it at the time, but I've held a broadly favorable view of it before going into this version. Now is the point where I became convinced I had lost my mind, because this game is terrible. It looks worse, animates worse, and feels so much worse than what I remember. I think the camera spends more time zoomed out in this version? I don't know, maybe I just have standards now for whatever reason. Maybe something happened to the movement acceleration in the conversion? I'm so tired. This is the worst version of this game and that's a bummer.
It's never a good sign when a console has a frickin' Daisenryaku game as the only exclusive for a month. We've also seen a month that saw only three games followed by a month consisting of soggy leftovers. Oof. Let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
We're starting with the original version of a game we've already looked at on the PS1 and Saturn. As of now, we have covered every console version of the first four games developed by Crystal D, who were determined to spread the misery around to as many places as possible. Maybe I need to do more in-depth research about these chuckleheads.
This being our third go around with Off-World Interceptor, I super have nothing new to add. Even though the later ports tacked the word 'Extreme' onto the end of the title, they're 99% the exact same as this original release. For whatever reason, I had the idea in my head this whole time that the shitty joke track layered over the FMV was the big change made for the 'Extreme' ports, and the original had the unaltered live action footage. Turns out I was completely and totally wrong about that. The FMV is sadly as unchanged as the gameplay. That's a real bummer, because these jokes make me increasingly angry every time I watch it. The only differences I could spot are that the 3DO version runs slightly worse and seems to be balanced at a slightly higher difficulty. Those are two things that do not mix well together.
Still don't know what the deal is with these
My issue with the writing came into even sharper focus when I streamed it. If you watch a cheesy movie or any other low quality dramatic performance with other people, either physically or virtually, the tendency is to make fun of it. It's a communal exercise to think of funny or clever goofs, and it's enjoyable even if no one involved comes up with anything good. That's the whole idea behind MST3K, except in that case those jokes were carefully chosen by a room full of writers who watched the footage multiple times. Lazy knock-offs like you see here will have one or two guys watch the footage once or twice and they'll crap out the first things that come to mind. It doesn't help that in this case the voiceover uses a frat bro affect, which only heightens the annoyance. You know, I've complained about this enough times that I might as well show you a cutscene compilation. As a warning, watching it deals significant psychic damage.
There's always at least one game per entry in this 3DO blog series that can be described as 'inexplicable', and that's the only word I can come up with to describe this thing. Basically, Strahl is an old school Interactive Movie in the style of Dragon's Lair but with anime. You might think that's very explicable, right up until I tell you this was originally released on the Pioneer Laseractive. If you know what that is, don't spoil it for the person sitting next to you, this is gonna be a journey.
Pioneer is a moderately large consumer electronics corporation in Japan known mainly for their early involvement with optical media and their current emphasis on car accessories. That first part is of interest to us, because they were one of the biggest companies who tried to make LaserDisc happen. You remember LaserDiscs, right? They're everyone's favorite absurdly large optical disc format. Anyway, there's not a ton of information in English about why, but in 1993 Pioneer put on sale an enormous box called the LaserActive for something like $1000, and it might be the most absurd 'console' ever put on shelves.
Big chonk
The LaserActive is a little more than three times the volume of an original Xbox and three times the weight. The top half is a combined LaserDisc/Compact Disc player and the bottom half is modular, which can switch between Mega CD, PC Engine CD, and karaoke modules. You might think you read that wrong, but Pioneer did in fact do business deals with Sega and NEC to make this monstrosity fully compatible with Genesis and Turbografix games. Trying to explain how this physically works gives me a headache, so read this instead. The main thing to note is that all of the games released specifically for the LaserActive needed to use the LaserDisc player in conjunction with either the Mega CD or PC Engine CD modules. So, any individual game would come with a big 'ol LaserDisc and a smaller CD or maybe even a Genesis cart or Hucard, which made them prohibitively expensive. Because of this bizarre mixed media setup, there were exceptionally restrictive constraints placed on what kinds of games would work on it. This means the 50-odd games put out on the thing during its three year lifespan were all either some flavor of Rail Shooter or Interactive Movie. One of these was Strahl.
Not that Strahl was developed with the LaserActive in mind. As far as I know, it was originally developed in 1985 as an arcade LaserDisc game meant to ride the coattails of Dragon's Lair. My guess is that Data East got in too late and by the time the game was ready for distribution the interest in LaserDisc cabinets had bottomed out. So, Strahl was put on the shelf until an easy publishing opportunity presented itself. It would sit there for a decade. I don't know why they decided the LaserActive was the right platform instead of the earlier CD based systems, but I guess once the work was done to make the game functional on a modern system it wasn't that hard to port it over to the CD format entirely. That's as far as I can reckon how it made its way to the 3DO.
Genuinely clear instructions
With all this build-up, is the game itself anything to write home about? Of course not. The experience consists of an intro cutscene and eight disconnected playable scenes. You access those scenes from a stage select screen where you have three options for the first level and then the remaining six in any order until you unlock the final scene. That makes progression slightly open-ended, and supposedly playing the scenes in different orders unlocks different endings. If you fail a scene, you get booted back to the stage select to try any of the available options again. It seems like you have three lives and if you run through them you start from the beginning. This is a significantly simpler structure than the Bluthimation games, where each scene leads into each other semi-randomly. Strahl is much fairer than those games, which is why it wouldn't have worked in an arcade setting. Continuing from that idea is the generous and clearly communicated input prompts found here. In that regard, the gameplay works more like modern Quick Time Events than in Dragon's Lair; this will be the only time you see me express a positive opinion about QTEs.
I love to evilly lurk
The premise driving the action forward is almost nothing. You play as some guy who is instructed by an old man, who is actually God, to gather seven crystals and defeat an evil wizard or something. The narration implies your guy is supposed to become the rightful king of the land after the adventure, but I got an ending where he seems to transform into some kind of bodhisattva so who the hell knows. The scenes themselves are disconnected from each other thematically, with each usually revolving around some kind of boss fight. That brings us to the footage itself. The animation here is on the same tier as a mid-budget 80's anime OVA. That would have provided a fine counterpoint to 80's American animation, which is generally gnarly to look at, but this is the mid 90's at this point so the entire look and sound of this thing is downright anachronistic.
Overall, it's easy enough to play and you could have an alright time watching someone else play it **hint** watch my stream archive **hint**. Though, I can't imagine paying full price for this thing at release. Also, as a housekeeping note the copyright on this game is 1995, so it looks like the LaserActive release was '94 and it was ported the next year. That would seem to invalidate its inclusion in the '94 3DO line-up, but here's the thing: nothing is real and the world is chaos. As such, I'm putting it on the list and you can't stop me. As a consolation, here's a contemporary EGM review of this game.
This same reviewer gave Rayman an 8.0 so I don't trust anything he says
We last encountered this game with its Saturn version released in September '95. If you're wondering whether this earlier 3DO version is literally the same game, the answer is yes. The only difference I noticed is that it seems to run at a lower resolution and the onscreen cursor doesn't move as well. Even with those minor technical flaws, this still might be one of the better 3DO games we've seen so far by default. That's all I have to say. There are better ways to play Mahjong Solitaire these days and the PC version of this would have been a better choice back in the mid 90's. I've also gone over the history of this franchise, so what else is there…
Some of the alternate game modes are kinda interesting
Right, where does Mahjong Solitaire even come from, anyway? The Shanghai series of video games got started in 1986, but the idea had to come from some earlier source. As far as I can tell, The first documented instance of this style of game comes from an American guy named Brodie Lockard, who programmed the first Shanghai game on a PLATO terminal, of all things, in 1981. He claims to have seen someone play the turtle configuration in real life, but I don't know of any documentation of that being a thing at any point before 1981. As far as I'm concerned, he made it up, which is wild.
Then there's Mahjong itself, which has all kinds of legends around its origins, but no documented evidence can be found any earlier than the 1880's. That's surprisingly young for something so ubiquitous. Best anyone can tell is that it developed as a combination of a kind of card game dating back to the Ming era and dominoes. There are also the similarities between Mahjong and Rummy, which is a rabbit hole I am in no way equipped to explore. I suggest you do what I do and assume every card and tabletop game is less than 200 year old, no matter how traditional it seems. I don't have anything else to say about this…oh, did you know that nice, full sized mahjong sets are stupid heavy? Ok I'm done here.
I already discussed this thing way too much in my Starblade Alpha write-up in the PS1 series. That game is an almost completely straight port of this one, with only some performance differences between them. That might be understating it a bit. While this game has the same old/new graphics option as the later port, the new graphics here cut the framerate clean in half, which is incredibly jarring. In fact, that mode is almost unplayable with its performance problems. I think that's all I have to say on the experience itself. I still don't know the rationale at Namco to initially publish this thing on the 3DO before putting it on Japanese Playstations. The past is mysterious like that sometimes. Anyway, here's a video of some old amusements resellers prepping a Starblade cabinet for shipment to a museum.
It felt like I had a lot of build-up for this game. That's due to this thing tangentially came up when I went through my research on Virtual Hydlide and King's Field. It's almost like I'm closing a loop on bad mid 90s Ultima Underworld knockoffs. That's what Slayer is, in all honesty. It takes the hot new first person free movement gameplay from Doom and adds the AD&D ruleset on top of it. That seems novel on the surface, but it was actually a terrible idea that never had a hope of working out.
Do I need to explain Advanced Dungeons & Dragons? I really don't want to, mainly because I have no affinity for the old Infinity Engine games and my only D&D experience is from playing a 3.5 campaign like 15 years ago. I know that AD&D was the second edition that cleaned up a bunch of the initial bugs in the original version, and that it was the main version for most of the 80's and 90's. I'm not researching it further because of my above stated reticence. I know that THAC0 stands for To Hit Armor Class 0 and is important, not that I could explain it since every time someone tells me the knowledge evaporates from my brain after approximately 80 seconds. It might as well be anti-memetic knowledge. The upshot of all this is that I can't evaluate this game from the AD&D angle, and as such I will assume it's a moderately poor implementation of that ruleset and move on.
Like any self-respecting Rogue-Like, there's basically no plot
What I can evaluate is the game experience itself, which is atrocious. That's in spite of the strong first impression it gives you. The character creator is highly detailed and customizable in a way that generally wasn't seen in console games at the time. Additionally, the difficulty selection is reasonable, and the random seed dungeon generation is a cool thing to see for the time, even if it wasn't brand new tech. Yet, the whole thing goes off the rails the moment you enter gameplay. While AD&D: Slayer does have free movement, that movement feels bad with weird and uneven acceleration. That puts it in an awkward no man's land that isn't the smooth 0 to 60 of Doom, the slow steadiness of Ultima Underworld, or even the consistent-ish 15 FPS crawl of the contemporary King's Field. Every press of the d-pad is mildly unpleasant in this game. That still makes movement better than the combat.
Now we have to touch on this game's fatal flaw. The developers attempted to combine real-time first-person action with the inherently turn-based ruleset of AD&D and it doesn't even slightly work. When you get into attack range of a MoB and swing your weapon, it doesn't matter how you're positioned or where you're specifically swinging at, as long as you are facing the enemy, you'll trigger a dice roll to determine whether you hit (I think this is where THAC0 comes in) and another dice roll to determine damage. Your attacks are on a multi-second cooldown because turns in D&D are abstracted as some short time range. Also because of this, it's sketchy to attempt a King's Field maneuver of walking in to hit and walking back to avoid counterattacks. If you or the enemy are within range at the beginning of an attack the dice still roll.
I forgot to mention the graphics and audio. They exist.
Another consequence of the real-time AD&D implementation relates to the relative strictness around hit rates inherent to the ruleset. You're going to whiff most of your swings no matter what, and if you're underpowered compared to an enemy you'll stand there whacking away doing absolutely nothing. That can be mitigated in a party focused turn-based game, especially with a humane Dungeon Master, but in a single player dungeon crawler it kills the experience dead. There's a magic system that hits better, but you only get so many spells between rests. There's no way to go about the combat that isn't a tedious chore. None of this is even touching the inventory system, which pisses me off just thinking about. In the interest of my own mental health, I'll just say accessing inventory doesn't pause the game and the in-menu cursor is less than ideal.
Not a particularly fun guy
In the end, we have a procedural Rogue-Like Dungeon Crawler with a poor implementation of the AD&D ruleset. It's barely playable, which still sadly puts it above more of its 3DO contemporaries than I would like to admit. As far as background goes, this was the second to last product of the long-time collaboration between the publisher, SSI, and the D&D rights holder, TSR. Previous output in this relationship includes the Gold Box and Eye of the Beholder games. I have no experience with those, and I imagine they're nightmares to try and go back to. I guess SSI used this as a side hustle to fund their faltering Strategy game business. The relationship between SSI and TSR seems to have been acrimonious and I imagine that would make for an entertaining story. I don't know that story and I encourage you to look it up on your own time. Regardless, the 3DO finally has an RPG and I'm glad to have this thing behind me.
With that, we wrap up our first set of '94 3DO games as expected: not with a bang, but a wet fart. These have been the 25 games for which I found release dates when I put together the calendar. You might be able to go on Wikipedia or somewhere and "well actually" me about some release date or another, and to you I only have one response: nothing is true. As such, I draw an arbitrary line here separating these games from the 40 others we have yet to address. Before getting into what happens next, here's an update to the Ranking Of All 3DO Games.
1. Road Rash
…
2. Shanghai: Triple Threat
5. Starblade
8. Strahl
22. AD&D: Slayer
28. Off-World Interceptor
…
39. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Yeah, this was one of the better weeks we've had, overall. What a cursed console. Now that we've dealt with that, what's next? It's easy to forget that there was a competitor in North America to the 3DO, because consumers at the time sure did forget about it. That's right, next time we're going to revisit the Atari Jaguar and its journey through 1994. It shouldn't surprise anyone when I say it's going to be a relatively short journey. So, prepare yourselves, because in three weeks we'll look at Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, and Alien vs. Predator.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
One of those streams covered the games featured in this article. You can watch the archive below.
We start April off with the home port of our third and last post-SFII successor game. X-Men: Children of the Atom originally hit Japanese arcades all the way back in December '94. This would have placed it directly in-between the releases of Darkstalkers and SF Alpha. The timing on this Saturn version was less advantageous, by the time it reached North American shelves both Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Marvel Super Heroes (a pseudo-sequel to this game) had been in U.S. arcades for some months and X-Men vs Street Fighter would be around before the end of the year. Now that I've typed it out, Capcom might have been too prolific with their CP System II Fighters.
In full acceptance that I'm going to sound like an ignorant jackass, I'll attempt to summarize the gameplay developments Capcom worked through between Super Street Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha, a period of roughly 16 months. The original Darkstalkers came first and changed up the Super Turbo formula with EX specials, air blocking, chain combos, crouch walking, and super meter drain. Next was this game, which didn't seem to build on Darkstalkers so much as go in a slightly different direction from Super Turbo. Here we see super jumps, rolling after knockdowns, projectile aiming, throw follow-through, and an informally segmented super meter. While those changes seem milder, X-Men also just feels so much faster and chaotic than Darkstalkers, but we'll get to that. Next is Darkstalkers' Revenge, which doesn't change that much from the first, except it walks back the super meter drain which I guess was unpopular with players. When Alpha eventually hit arcades in mid '95, it carried over air blocking and chain combos from Darkstalkers in addition to the segmented meter and rolling after knockdowns from X-men while adding a special counter mechanic. If I knew anything about high level Fighting gameplay, these developments would seem very important and/or controversial. Because I'm not quite that sick in the head, I'll just note that Capcom was busy cooking in the mid 90's.
Who would win, the lightning lady or the guy with a metal skeleton I'll give you a minute to figure it out.
None of that is getting into the weird and wild release schedule of the various home ports for these games, all of which we've seen before at some point, and completely out of order, in this blog series; it seems appropriate that we're seeing the middle game in this line-up last. All this being said, how is the actual game in its own right? It's alright. These Capcom Fighters are fundamentally good. Not just in the controls and mechanics, but in terms of visual artistry, music, sound design, and overall personality they were unrivaled in their genre until Arc System Works got in on the action. Speaking of Arc, If the experience in X-Men stands out from its peers in any way, it would be in the frenetic feel of the matches and density of nonsense happening onscreen. From my limited time, the flow of the fights feels just slightly over the edge of readability and into incoherence. I'm not able to put it into better words, but it feels like a predecessor to the later Anime Fighter sub-genre, and since it was made four years prior to Guilty Gear I can make that kind of statement without getting into trouble. This is also burying the lede on its other, more direct impact. While Alpha and Darkstalkers would go on to have their own series, X-Men is going to lead into Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men vs. Capcom, and then the whole Versus meta-series of Fighting games.
I've spent this much space on background info because I didn't make it very far into the game itself. It has all of the features we've come to expect from CP System II ports, with the only notable addition being a group battle mode where two players pick five characters each and have a kind of competitive ladder fight. That's a neat idea and it’s easy to imagine turning that into the 3v3 system we know from the Versus games.
Then there's the subject matter. I would say that I know a moderate amount about marvel comics stuff, though the 90's tended to produce characters and storylines best left in the past. That's why the roster in this game would seem weird to modern players. Let's take a look. We've got Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Iceman, Colossus, Psylocke, Omega Read, Spiral, Silver Samurai, and a Sentinel as playables with Juggernaut and Magneto acting as bosses. Now, those first three are original crew x-people and make perfect sense. The next two seem like kinda second tier x-men but it isn't weird to include them. Psylocke seems like an odd choice; I know she has enthusiasts in the readership but that character has never really broken mainstream. Then we get to the playable villains. I know who Silver Samurai is, though he doesn't seem like an A-tier x-men villain, and I guess it makes sense to put a sentinel in there even if it is generic. Omega Red's inclusion is hilarious and works as well as carbon dating to pinpoint when this thing was made. Then there's Spiral. I had no clue who that was, so I looked her up. Remember when I said the 90's were best left in the past?
So, uh, yeah
About half of these characters and the bosses seem to be included because of their roles in a comic storyline that ran in the back half of 1993, and I imagine the licensing discussions would have taken place shortly afterwards. For the rest: the comics seem to have recently come off a sentinel centric storyline from a few years prior, Silver Samurai was probably the most prominent Japanese mutant at the time, and Marvel was pushing Omega Red as a Very Important Character™ every chance they got. Then there's Psylocke and Spiral. I looked up what the reason could have been for those two, and I wish I didn't. Turns out Psylocke was originally Captain Britain's sister who could pull out a cool laser knife. In 1989 there was a bizarre storyline where she gets kidnapped by ninjas, brainwashed, and physically altered to look like a Japanese woman. That's problematic, and I personally think DC handled it better when they turned Dr. Light into a Japanese woman…don't ask. Anyway, in '93 some writer at Marvel came around and tried to fix that obviously iffy character development by retconning it as a body swap between the original Psylocke and some Japanese ninja assassin lady, with both ending up back in their original bodies…kinda, I think. The upshot is that this was the other major X-Men storyline going on in late '93, and that's why Psylocke is here. Oh, and Spiral was a minor villain in that arc so she's here to give Psylocke someone to fight, I guess. This probably wasn't the best way to fill out the roster. If they had just taken the main cast of the recent animated show, it might have done better in North America. Regardless, I learned more than I wanted from this game and now so have you.
I'm going to jump straight to the conclusion just to get it out of the way, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei is the best game that I have yet played for the Saturn. Being an improvement over its predecessor, which was the previous best game on the system, this is the crowning achievement of Team Andromeda's doomed effort to single-handedly drag the Saturn into relevancy. Some would say that the next Panzer Dragoon game, Saga, would be their pinnacle, but as we will eventually see, that game was too little and too late. Instead, we're left with Zwei, easily the best Rail Shooter of that genre's heyday.
Describing the game is a relatively straightforward matter. Zwei reuses the game engine, structure, and basic gameplay loop of the original. This consists of seven levels, called Episodes in the game, where you play as a guy riding around on a young dragon that generally knows where it's going. There's some freedom to move the dragon around the screen in a few sections, but for the most part you're relegated standing in place and shooting everything that moves. To do that you use either a semi-auto free aiming laser gun or the series standard lock-on shots. This is supplemented with a meter-defined super ability which acts as a screen clearing move. This also describes the first one's gameplay, but here there's the added benefit of improved camera turns and a minimap. The big gimmick are the on-foot sections, where the dragon will run around on the ground for certain parts of an Episode. While the shooting works the same, the mobility and dodge opportunities are hampered, giving a greater emphasis on shooting enemies before they can hit you. Without using continues, a playthrough takes around 30-40 minutes.
Foreshadowing
If that sounds basic and dull, know that the encounter and boss design and better thought-out than any other game in the genre and the difficulty settings are precisely dialed in. Even still, the gameplay serves as something to do while experiencing the artistic and technical showcase infused into every section of every episode. That same sentence could also apply to the first Panzer Dragoon, but the swings taken here are bigger and go further, as you would hope from a sequel. The overall plot is still based on enigmatic vibes more than anything else, though there is more narration than before and a coherent throughline to hold the structure together. This relies on voiceover from the player character, a rustic boy who sheltered and raised a mutated herd animal which grows into the aforementioned dragon. In essence, a mysterious ancient airship destroys the boy's village for unknown reasons, and he chases it seeking revenge while contending with the forces of some evil empire that is also out for that airship. In the end, he and his dragon blow everything up before said dragon leaves him behind with a prophetic vision of the events from the first game. So, this is a prequel origin story for the dragon, who I guess is the actual series protagonist.
That limited story and its hints at worldbuilding through the fake language and captivating visual design are mysterious enough to be intriguing, but still don't leave much to latch onto in its own right. What you're here for is the audio/visual experience of it all. The visuals are not only improved from the previous entry but would have been the best available for 32-bit consoles at the time. This is the most graphically stable Saturn title I have yet seen, with enough polygonal density and a long enough rendering distance to pull off the grand set pieces demanded by the visual design. Everything looks otherworldly and alien, while also being explicable in functionality. A lot of mileage is gotten from the juxtaposition of various visual styles present here. You have the tribal aesthetic of the player character and his home village, the vaguely disconcerting creature designs, the technological sophistication of the unknowable ancient devices, and the aquiline, post-steampunk nature of the imperial forces all kind of mashed together in a way that shouldn't work as well as it does.
See? Foreshadowing
That otherworldly feeling is bolstered by the audio design. While the sound effects are entirely serviceable, the soundtrack is what does the heavy lifting. Even though Zwei lacks the orchestral arrangements of the first game, the composer, Yayoi Wachi, makes use of the Saturn's sound chip in ways that could have been matched by only a handful of contemporary video game composers. I have a difficult time trying to ascribe a musical style to this soundtrack; the closest I get is that it at times evokes some of the later and more esoteric Shin Megami Tensei games. I personally consider that a complement. Of special note for me is the track in the first half of the second episode, The Great Ravine, which you can listen to below, though I would recommend listening to overall OST.
That combination of tight design with audio and visual creative mastery leads to some of the most impressive set pieces I have yet seen from this console generation. Of special note are the first major boss fight and the environment of the sixtth episode. That first boss fight is against an airship, which is on the surface a callback to the first boss in the original game. This time, however, the dragon is running along the ground while the airship flies along all four sides. Most of the pieces of the boss are destructible and will fall off after taking enough damage, including weapons and cargo containers, so I guess this is a heavily armed cargo ship of some kind. As pieces fall off, they will bounce along the ground and potentially hit you, so they will need to be shot or avoided. The amount of stuff that can semi-dynamically bounce around while the airship smokes overhead create an epic feeling spectacle that would have been ahead of its time.
The sixth episode has the player flying along, through, around, and under the antagonistic ancient airship blowing up various parts while dealing with its defenses. The sense of size and physical consistency of the level is complemented by the overall design of the ship and the open sky floored by a far-off sea of clouds. The ship appears on the outside to be bleached white from centuries left out in the sun while also being obviously more advanced than anything else seen in the game, with the interior looking like the dilapidated ruins flown through in the fourth episode. The way it all looks and sounds, combined with the immediate danger of the combat creates a strange, ethereal mood hard to find in console games of the 90's.
It blows up real good
I'm not accustomed to giving out effusive praise, but I feel the need to eulogize Zwei as I would one tragically cut down in the prime of life. See, the Panzer Dragoon series never sold particularly well. The sales data is sketchy/non-existent, but my best guesstimate has these first two games selling well under 1 million units worldwide. We all know how things went for Saga and Orta doesn't seem to have even breached 300k. Funny part is that all four games reviewed well. If this was some middle budget series from a B-tier developer, those number would have been plenty sustainable. Sadly, these games wound up in the unlikely position as the flagship IP for the Saturn. They probably weren't supposed to be, which would explain Sega's late movements to do anything with this franchise. I mean, Bug! was intended to be the next big thing right up until they realized that game was dogshit. The Clockwork Knight games were too old-school in their sensibilities for consumers to care about and, as we will soon see, Nights into Dreams wasn't going to be the new Sonic. Sega stumbled upon the coolest new series of the mid 90's and completely whiffed at using it.
Panzer Dragoon II Zwei might end up being the best, or near-best, game on the Saturn, but it's also the most emblematic example of how Sega destroyed their own console business in the 90's.
While we're on the subject of critically acclaimed flops, let's talk about Treasure. Or that would be what I would say if I was in any way equipped to talk about them. Turns out I know basically nothing about them, and I have no attachment to their games. I've heard of Gunstar Heroes, Mischief Makers, and Radient Silvergun but other than maybe 10 minutes of messing around with Ikaruga twenty years ago I can't say that I've ever played their games. I know they tended to review well and are fondly remembered as masters of the 2D action genre, but I don't have a clear understanding as to why. So, lacking context, let's look at Guardian Heroes on its own merits.
At its most basic, this game is a 2.5D side-scrolling Beat 'Em Up in the classic style. You have a sprite-based character that you walk back and forth along a stage that is three lanes deep. You can jump between those lanes using the shoulder buttons, and usually you can only attack enemies in your lane. You have a standard character selection, with each offering a different balance for combat. That's not too helpful playing alone, but can probably get interesting in coop. That combat works off of a two-button melee and one button magic system, with limited room for combos and specials. The gameplay works exactly as you expect, no more and no less. All the interesting stuff is around the edges.
There's a decent amount of visual chaos
As I hinted above, this is likely meant to be a multiplayer game. It actually reminds me of the much later and likely unrelated Castle Crashers to some extent. The story can be played by, I think, up to four players and there's a kind of proto-Platform Fighter competitive multiplayer mode which supports the six-player controller splitter doohickey that no one bought. That's already relatively full featured for the time, but the story mode has a lot more going on than contemporary arcade Beat 'Em Ups. First, the characters level up between stages, and you can assign basic attribute points. That isn't much but Beat 'Em Ups are generally improved with RPG elements. Second, for most of the game you have an undead knight buddy to whom you can issue basic orders. But most importantly, this thing features multiple branching paths and a simple karma system that work together to create a shocking variety of outcomes in a choose your own adventure kind of way. There are several very different endings and maybe around a dozen ways to get to them. Considering that a playthrough lasts about an hour, players at the time would have been looking at a better content/price ratio than they would have been used to from Action games.
That's not to say the story is any good or well written, however, because of course it isn't. Guardian Heroes has a very basic fantasy JRPG plot with an evil empire, scheming wizards, dethroned royals, and malicious gods that need killing. The only plot element that spices things up a little is the cursed sword which resurrects the undead buddy, though that never really goes anywhere worth going. On top of that, the thing is poorly told through bad, overlong dialogue that went through a, let's say, questionable translation. In fact, the funky English combined with the jokey tone provides a certain camp value which gives the story more charm than it deserves. It balances out somehow to be an ironically positive aspect of the experience.
Oh, word?
That brings us to the look and feel. The visual design of the various characters evokes butt-tier 90's anime, at least for me. The art style isn't of the same level of quality as something like Astal or any of the Capcom Fighting games, but it's still better than the various attempts we've seen at rotoscoped sprites. Almost despite the questionable aesthetic, the thing animates very well throughout, so again somehow the visuals wrap back around to being good. What is unquestionably the strongest aspect of the experience is the music. I really dig what Treasure was putting down with the audio, and I would say it benefits from not having voice acting that would ruin the vibe. As a reviewer, I'm easily swayed by cheesy vocals and/or random saxophones in game soundtracks. As such, I give the music here 10/10. The least you can do is spend two minutes of your life listening to Shuffler in the Dark through to the end:
The only issue I have is the weird difficulty curve where things become completely unreasonable in the latter part of the game. I'm not sure if there's supposed to be a persistent levelling thing for the characters or what, but I got literally stomped out on what seems like either the second or third to last level after having a very reasonable time up to that point. Still, it's not an insurmountable issue and the totality of the experience is still top notch for the mid 90's. It seems that contemporary reviewers largely agreed with me, though it seems to have sold about as poorly as any other Saturn game. That was enough for it to gain a cult following among Treasure fans (who, again, I do not understand) and it received a release on Xbox Live in 2011 with the online multiplayer you would want from it. I think that version might still work on modern systems, which is neat. I'm not going to recommend every Xbox owner go drop, let's see…five dollars? Huh? Nothing's $5 anymore. Well shit, I guess I do recommend everyone go buy the Xbox version, why not.
This was more of a quality over quantity month for the Saturn, which is a refrain made to make losers feel better about themselves. I might be feeling generous after purging all of that negativity last week, which could explain my sanguine ordering in this week's update to the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
Like everyone, there are games I don't enjoy, there are genres that don't appeal to me, and developers whose games I can't stand. This usually doesn't matter too much. I've never enjoyed a single Naughty Game I've played, but there are plenty of other things I can do with my time. I've never jibed with the dungeon design in the Zelda series, but games use a variety of styles for level design. It's normal to dislike some things and like others, everyone has their own idiosyncratic preferences. But then there's FromSoftware.
When Demon's Souls came out, it was easy to write it off as a game for weirdo freaks without begrudging them their niche. Dark Souls was released two years later to universal acclaim, with assurances that it was a much more playable game than its predecessor. That media environment rope-a-doped a young and easily influenced version of me into buying a copy out of FOMO. It turned out it was still a game for weird freaks and video game reviewers had all caught some kind of memetic virus. Even though I was out $60 on unplayable ragebait, I came away knowing which media voices were untrustworthy and the consolation that FromSoft's particular nonsense was unique, and no other studio would replicate it. The weird freaks would over time get the Dark Souls sequels they deserved, and there's nothing wrong with that. Four years later, the world would be burdened with the existence of Bloodborne. There was a similar reaction to it by the game press, but as I was by now once bitten, twice shy, I waited until the accursed thing was on deep discount before trying it out. It was the same result, but that time I was only out $20 for the knowledge.
[REDACTED: Picture of me doing the Youtuber thumbnail face and pointing at Elden Ring box art]
I didn't fall for Sekiro, as the public FOMO pressures were subdued for that one. Then there's Elden Ring. There was the universal acclaim we all have come to expect, but it seemed like everyone who owned a current gen console bought the thing and the word-of-mouth pressures were ratcheted to the highest level possible. Suffice to say it was a Charlie Brown trying to kick the football kind of situation. Looking at this story on its own, you could conclude that I'm just a schmuck who needs to git gud. But here's the rub, these pieces of crap make so much money and have such social media exposure that the tide of copycats has been rising steadily since 2011. It's to the point that Action RPGs have almost completely been subsumed into the "Soulslike" sub-genre. That is the true problem.
I would love nothing more than to rip the various genre conventions of "Soulslikes" which originated as copycats to FromSoft's Soulsborne games to shreds and incinerate the pieces. Yet, I don't want to fight a last stand against the internet without being sufficiently armed. I'm not going to feel prepared without a full understanding of the background behind the development of Soulsborne game design. That requires research, and the first step in that research is to look at the origins of the developer. Where did the studio come from? What is the source of their design philosophy? How did things come to this? The thread of any aspect of history can be followed all the way back into irrelevance, so I'll confine my initial effort to the works of FromSoft. All of this means that I will endeavor to play every one of their games in the order that they were released. I'll keep an eye on design traditions and how they change or stagnate over time. Most of the people who undertake this kind of thing have already fully drunk the modern Soulsborne Kool-Aid, and I've never seen satisfactory analysis from those sources. I will approach this topic with a more critical eye than it is accustomed.
First things first. FromSoftware existed for a while before, unfortunately, getting into game development. We will need to start there before we get to the virtual masochism.
From what I could tell, a man named Naotoshi Zin got into a motorcycle crash somewhere in Tokyo in 1984 or 1986. He apparently received a large cash payout from his insurance provider and spent his medical recuperation putting together a business idea. The fog of time and the language barrier prevents us from knowing more details than that, but he eventually registered a new business on November 10, 1986, under the name FromSoftware, inc. If anyone knows why the company was founded under that name, they haven't recorded it in English. Zin's company would spend the next several years producing business software. I've seen references to agricultural management and accounting software that I have not been able to confirm.
Naotoshi Zin
Regardless of what actually happened in the 80's, by the early 90's Zin was looking to diversify FromSoft's products. Supposedly, the idea to move into video games came from one of the company's software developers, Yasuyoshi Karasawa, who had been messing around with early polygonal rendering programs. Zin was a big Wizardry fan because of course he was and set aside a small team of three or so guys to prototype out some ideas for a PC-98 game. That project fell through, but with the announcement of the Sony Playstation, Zin and his enthusiastic game team decided to roll the dice with that upcoming console. They had apparently spent a lot of time going back and forth on whether to create a mecha or fantasy dungeon crawler, with fantasy winning out fairly late in production. As the story goes, King's Field began serious development in March 1994 and was showcased two months later under the name Crystal Dragon at what was probably the Tokyo Toy Show, which was a predecessor to the Tokyo Game Show.
I don't know how much to trust the few details I have about this time period, so I'm keeping this narrative at a high level. The game was a complete mess for most of its development, with maybe 10 people on the production team who had never made a game before. Yet, the fact that they were trying to make a fully polygonal dungeon crawler was weird enough to catch a little bit of Sony's attention and get them a license to publish on the upcoming console. Sony also seems to have sold some necessary 3D rendering equipment to Zin for 2 million yen during the game's development. Even then it can't be overstated how little the guys at FromSoft knew about what they were doing, and Eiichi Hasegawa was hired as lead programmer partway through development specifically because he had worked on games before. Hasegawa likely had a large hand in making the thing playable at all in time for the PS1 launch.
Eiichi Hasegawa
Even then, the combination of the team's outdated tastes in games, ignorance of design best practices, and a ton of corner-cutting led to the end product being a weird, janky, and barely playable game. King's Field released in Japan on December 16, 1994, exclusively for the PS1. It had no marketing budget, and since FromSoft needed Sony's assistance to physically publish the game, only around 13,000 copies were initially printed. The game bombed with Japanese reviewers and wasn't expected to receive any player interest. It didn't at first, for reasons we will discuss shortly, but it gradually garnered a cult following on early internet message boards. Its popularity gradually increased in the months after release, and it sold somewhere around 200,000 copies by the middle of 1995. This was encouraging enough that Zin and co. immediately began work on a sequel, but that's a story for the future because first we need to grapple with the reality of what King's Field even is or is trying to be.
The game which made its way onto store shelves is a fantasy first-person Dungeon Crawler with free movement. That's a lot of descriptors, so let's start with what that means. Hopefully anyone reading this knows what a Dungeon Crawler is; the old genre was popularized by the Wizardry series and most computer RPGs from the 80's were in this style. The basic idea is to take the spelunking parts of a typical D&D campaign and use the computer as a dungeon master. I spent most of my post on Hydlide talking about the history of RPGs, so read that for context. The first-person viewpoint was a common angle for Dungeon Crawlers, so that's very normal, and when I say fantasy, I mean there's magic and dragons. The interesting part is the whole free-movement thing. What I mean by that is the player can move around however they want, not aligned to any kind of grid or preset viewpoints. This technical innovation was popularized by 1992's Ultima Underworld, which was also notable as being the immediate inspiration for Wolfenstein 3D. Once developers all over the world realized this technique had become feasible, everyone started iterating on it. I've gone into all these minutiae because this specific kind of game had not been executed particularly well on consoles up to this point, and it still wouldn't be for some time, if I'm being honest. For some context, King's Field came out the same month as AD&D Slayer on the 3DO.
Now that we've defined the thing, what actually happens in King's Field? A translated scan of the game manual lays out a very straightforward premise: there's an ancient underground temple turned cemetery which the king of this fantasy kingdom has had guys digging around in looking for magic stuff. One day, monsters appeared in that cemetery and the king keeps sending guys in to clear it out. You play as some dude named John whose father led some soldiers into the dungeon and didn't return, so of course you go in after him. The game starts much like Ultima Underworld with your character standing right inside of the front doors. Like that game, there are a few friendly NPCs to talk to on the first level and a lot of nonsense beneath. Those NPCs on the first level include the groundskeeper, a priest overseeing the cemetery chapel, the lone remaining garrison soldier, a legitimate shopkeeper who I guess services the soldiers, some grave robbers, and an illegitimate shopkeeper who likes ripping you off. There's also a lot of dead soldiers lying around because things haven't exactly gone well. These literally faceless idiots will give small tidbits of lore as you wander deeper into the dungeon, but it all amounts to very little. The first level is also the only place with shops and a healing fountain, so you'll be going back and forth to the starting area pretty often, as was the fashion of early cRPGs.
Ok, I'll admit that Basque Crize is a good fantasy anime name
Those NPCs are kinda necessary for getting past that first floor. There are a couple of simple item fetch quests you need to do before the game fully gets into gear. One of the guys mentions how the garrison scribe ran off with a shiny chalice for whatever reason, and you can find that guy's corpse in a side tunnel with the big cup and a message scrawled in the wall saying to put the thing back where it came from. Through trial and error, you can slot it into an alcove that activates the one healing fountain in the game, which was previously turned off. Then there's the map, which is not immediately available. You meet a graverobber in a random tunnel who tells you that his son went off somewhere with their map. You can eventually stumble across the son's corpse in a hidden room and acquire that map. Finally, in order to get to the second floor of the dungeon, you need to turn off an arrow trap, and to access the controls you need to get the key that opens most of the locked doors in the game on the first floor. The priest has it, though there's no way for you to know that. What you can learn is that someone stole the priest's cross, and he wants it back. When you eventually come across the second shopkeeper, who's located too far into the level to expect any business, he'll sell the cross to you for way too much gold. You have to thoroughly scrounge every accessible area of the floor for all the loot in order to afford that cross. From there you can exchange the cross for the key, which you don't know the priest has, and move on with life. All this stuff on the first floor took me like two and a half hours to do, and the level isn't that big.
There are a few very good reasons for that. First, the movement speed is glacial. Second, the combat takes a while at the beginning of the game. The thing with old school dungeon crawlers is that they have inverted difficulty curves with a spike at the end for the final boss. That means the hardest parts of these games are the first 30-60 minutes. In fact, it's common to have to restart these things once or twice before you figure out the correct way to play the early game. After you learn how the combat system works, your character or party level up a bit, and you get some decent equipment which makes the game much less difficult, with your power level increasing slightly faster than the encounter difficulty. The exception to this is unreasonable boss fights which serve as level/equipment checks. I cannot stress enough how standard these design sensibilities were in the 1980s. So at the beginning of this game, you're made out of cardboard and do almost no damage to MoBs. This is exacerbated by the particular quirks of the realtime combat inherent to this game engine.
You could say he had a bone to pick with me
Pressing the attack button swings a polygonal representation of your equipped weapon across the screen. The full animation takes a good two or three seconds. The hitbox for the attack is on that polygonal model, meaning your attack won't hit anything for a good second after you press the button. Also, every enemy in the game attacks between 2x and 4x faster than you, and the depth perception is lousy. To hit an enemy, you need to be within its attack range, and it's going to smack you at least once or twice in the amount of time it takes to hit it once. Remember that you're made out of cardboard at the start of the game. you're unlikely to survive even the first combat encounter, which will likely be against a little walking piranha plant guy. The way to do any and all melee combat in this game is to start your swing outside the enemy's attack range, walk while swinging into range just long enough for your attack to connect, and immediately back out. Doing this results in the enemy hitting you either once or not at all. Considering that this game runs at under 30 fps, has narrow environments, and the potential presence of more than one enemy at a time, this technique takes some time to get right. Nothing about it is intuitive or taught by the game, you either look it up or trial and error your way around for who knows how long. There's also magic, but you're not going to have anywhere near enough MP to rely on it for like the first 2/3rds of the game. If you hadn't realized by now, this is a bad combat system, even by the standards of the time.
Anyway, once the arrow trap is off you can get to the next floor and start aimlessly exploring around. This point is early enough that there aren't any good healing options other than walking back to the fountain on the first floor. One of the few oddly compassionate design choices in this game is that the central hallways on the first two floors are devoid of enemies, so if you can get out of whatever side area you're in, you will be relatively safe until you can heal. There are also healing items that can help extend your stints through the second floor, but that takes us to discussing the inventory system. As you can probably guess from the game's vintage, there are no item descriptions whatsoever for anything. That means you either have to look up what they do or use trial and error. That's fine for the basic items, like the healing herb or antidote herb which are cheap and plentiful. But as you make your way deeper into the game, you'll come across increasingly rare consumables and other items whose purpose isn’t immediately obvious. The best example is the Phantom Rod, which is a single-use item that will reveal false walls and invisible walkways. You won't know what it does until you use it, and even then, it's not immediately apparent, and you also won't know it's a consumable until you use one. There's also like five or six of them in the whole game. They might as well not exist for all the good they do. Then there's the cursed equipment, which you don't find out about until you try it on. Either you've played a cRPG before and know to save before trying on weird high-level gear, or you screw yourself. The entirety of item and equipment management comes across as half-baked. When a modern game pulls this kind of crap, it's intentional and the game is designed around it; when you see it in old games it's because of time or memory constraints and thus usually not adequately accounted for in the design.
I swear to God this game is just a shitpost
Back to the dungeon crawling, the second floor has a handful more NPCs to deal with. There's a soldier hiding out in a safe room who'll let you know that things went bad on the lower levels and he's the only one who made it out. He can apparently show up in different rooms throughout the game, but I only saw him here. There's a hermit wizard just kinda hanging out in a side cave who'll teach you new magic if you can show him THE TRUTH. There's an item you can find called a Truth Mirror, which explains whatever is in front of you when you use it, that you need to give him. While it is an otherwise necessary item, the magic you learn is the only healing spell in the game, which is vital. Also, you don't know what the magic is before you learn it. Finally, there's a minstrel sitting around at the end of a different side cave who has the item you need to get to the next floor. See, you're cut off from the level exit by a gaping chasm that you can't cross. The minstrel has a harp that will raise a bridge across that chasm when played. While the game indicates that you should find the minstrel, it doesn't point you to the actual utility of the harp. The minstrel wants one of the highest tier healing items in exchange for it, and if you've been poking into every single nook and cranny like I had then you'll have one to hand over. To finish with this level, new and tougher monsters are introduced as you would expect, and traps become more prevalent.
Things become more serious on the third floor. There are enemies who spawn in the central hallway and more of them are capable of throwing ranged attacks around. There's enough of a difficulty bump that it acts as a minor level/equipment check. You're either going to be running back and forth to the healing spring a lot or do what I did and grind infinite spiders on the first floor for like twenty minutes. Even then, your character level is only half the issue, with the other being equipment. That brings us to our next important gameplay feature: hidden rooms. You see, all of the good equipment in the game can only be found in areas beyond false walls. You would know that a wall is false by walking into it and passing right through. There is no other way to find them besides using the aforementioned Phantom Rod. To FromSoft's credit, they wanted the players to be aware of the fact that secret areas exist. The manual directly tells you that false walls exist and on the first two floors there are some areas where the monster AI will patrol back-and-forth through a wall. It would be hard to never realize these things are around, which is good because the critical path requires going through a false wall, though we'll get to that. Besides those, there are like two invisible bridges in the game, one of which is on the critical path. Nothing informs you that these exist, and you're supposed to just know to take a leap of faith. There's a little bit of signposting for the one on the critical path, which is literally two rooms from the final boss, but the other one is only found by throwing yourself into the void. JRPGs had featured invisible walkways before, so maybe Japanese game nerds would have known it as a testable possibility, though the price of experimentation is steep. The game can only be saved at specific save points found in the levels, with only a handful on each floor.
This signposting is like a ten second walk away from the guy
The reason why that description of this game's secrets is important is because the second-best sword in the game is found in a double-secret room on the third floor. If you find it in your first run through the level, it makes the fourth floor so much more reasonable to deal with, if you don't, well…yeah. The thing about that sword, Triple Fang, is that it gradually regens your health and MP, and magic only becomes a viable combat option after equipping it. That's vital as even a low-level attack spell can be important against high level monsters. This is because of how the stamina system works. There are two stamina bars, one for physical attacks and one for magic. Every time you swing your weapon, the physical stamina bar, which is more of a power meter I guess, empties and takes anywhere from one to 3 seconds to refill. You can swing again before it refills, but with a steep damage penalty. The same works for the magic meter, but it tends to refill faster and more consistently. I'll get to a description of the endgame enemies in a bit but suffice to say that the only decent way to deal with them is to stun-lock the jerks by alternating physical and magic attacks. Every time a monster takes damage it has a very short, and usually subtle, stun animation. Because of how long it takes between you being able to land physical attacks, that creates an opening for the monster to use one of their ranged attacks, which you very much do not want the endgame MoBs to use. Firing off magic while the attack meter recharges is the only way to prevent that. But, in order to use magic, you need MP, and the only way to refill MP is either to go to the healing fountain, use the highest tier healing item, or have a weapon with MP regen. Only the two best swords in the game can do that, and you don't get the second one until right before the final boss.
All that is to say you either find the Triple Fang or spend an extra five to ten more hours with the game than you should. Any player who knows anything will make a beeline to that sword first thing after getting to the third floor, after which combat stops being a problem for a while. That's good, because the level design becomes increasingly hostile at this point. Aside from decreasing the number of safe areas and increasing the traps, you start to see more big enemies in confined spaces that you can't run past and more groups of monsters who can gang up on you. Then there's this floor's gimmick. The critical path is blocked by a big stone pillar, and there are four pedestals in side rooms next to it corresponding to the four elements. If you've been thorough you'd have found at least one elemental stone and it shouldn't be hard to figure out what you need to do. If not, then, well…yeah. The thing is that the four stones you need are in four mundane chests scattered across floors two and three with no hint or indication of where to look for them. You could have found one or both of the stones on the previous floor and realized the gimmick, but regardless you're gonna wander around until you find all of them. The only NPC on this floor is the ghost of the king before last who teaches you the fireball spell, which should be the second and most useful attack spell you learn.
Those crosses are save points, which in my (perfectly legal) copy of the game caused a soft crash whenever I tried to use them
So, you wander the big cave loop of the third floor and maybe retrace the second floor until you find the stones. If you aren't using any resource materials or the Triple Fang, this would be exceptionally tedious. Once the pillar is down, though, you can backtrack to loot an annoying false wall maze or go on to the fourth floor. The thing is, once you cross the point where the stone pillar had been, you're not going to have any shortcuts back to the first floor until after you get to the end of the fourth floor. Previously, the exits on the second floor for the first and third were relatively nearby, making it not that much of a hassle to go back and forth to the shops and fountain. Now, going back from the fourth floor will take a significant amount of time and pose increasing danger. That means the only effective way to continue is to be prepared to do a thunder run from one end of the fourth floor to the other and have enough resources left to deal with a miniboss. Of course, you won't know that in a normal playthrough. Having HP and MP regen makes this immediately feasible, so I only partially stocked up before making the run.
A final note about the third floor. The last section is a linear and very long series of OSHA non-compliant bridges with an opportunity to get a replacement Truth Mirror. Doing so requires using the harp from earlier; this is the third and last spot where it comes up, with the second being a small bridge to access a treasure area on the second floor. The game has two methods of crossing chasms, which are used on a combined five occasions with almost no signposting. Anyway, the fourth floor is mostly linear on the first run through, though the various sections have intentionally spider-like layouts. The hallways are also narrow and filled with the largest enemy type, so there's not much running past anything. Another "fun" aspect is that almost every treasure chest or lootable object is blocked off by a bottomless pit trap. This is literally a combat gauntlet. After the first section, you get an antagonistic hallway filled with swinging spikes that hurt quite a lot. Dodging through them in one direction leads to an incredibly dangerous room containing an improved map and a fake shortcut that teleports you to a dead-end back on the third floor. The other direction takes you to an NPC, a dying soldier laying in an alcove who tells you that your father is already dead and buried. Turns out that reunion isn't happening. Regardless, we've already come this far, so on to the next section of the floor. You need to pass through a couple of rooms with the most annoying enemy in the game, which are jumping undead knights who are a hassle to hit. After that is a section that is the same as the first but going in the opposite direction.
I cannot stress enough how annoying these guys are
When you finally get to the big central hallway of the floor, you get to encounter your first endgame enemy, big guys who throw boulders at you. Taking boulders to the face is bad for your health, so the distance with them needs to be closed as quickly as the subdued walk speed allows. The reward at the end of this whole mess is a key that unlocks everything in the game. All of the locked doors and chests that would have been bypassed on previous floors are now accessible, as are the shortcuts on the fourth floor. There are multiple side rooms off that hallway, one of which contains the Feather Boots which you need to cross those bottomless pit traps and access your father's grave, which, RIP, I guess, but also you need to grab his sword or else you aren't finishing the game. You are then funneled into the miniboss' room, who is an evil wizard that transforms into a big gnarly skeleton. He isn't difficult when using the Triple Fang. Now you get to the final hall of the floor and a shortcut back to level one. Sadly, all of the nonsense with the fifth, and last, floor is going to require some explanation.
The first thing to note is that a lot of enemies on the fifth floor like to shoot explosive magic with a large area of effect, and those enemies tend to hang out in groups. This means that while you're whacking away at one the others will constantly try to nuke you. This adds an element of constant danger that the previous floor lacked, so good job on the developers, but it's also incredibly obnoxious. Second, this floor features a dragon and ghost elf lady who you absolutely must talk to if you want to actually finish the game, there is of course no clear signposting about this. To understand why they're absolutely necessary requires explaining the last two gameplay features which I have yet to touch on, character progression and sword magic. Being an RPG, you gain experience points from killing enemies and level up at set XP intervals, with your HP and MP increasing with each level-up. Most of the other granular character stats are determined by your equipment, which is very normal. Though, the special stats are strength and magic. These increase independently of your level based on how many physical and magical attacks you perform and are used to determine your character class and whether you can use sword magic. Using the term "character class" is misleading, as this serves merely as a title determined by specific thresholds for those two stats. You get the highest "class" once both stats go above 60. Note that strength and magic max out at 99. You need to be at that highest "class" and have retrieved your dad's sword in order for the ghost elf lady to use the dragon's magic to turn that sword into the game's ultimate weapon, the Moonlight Sword. Doing this is vital, because the final boss can only be defeated by using that weapon's sword magic. The game of course tells you none of this.
Just kinda vibing in a room next to the end boss
This brings us to sword magic, which is also something the game also doesn't tell you about. There are four magical swords that you can find, with the Triple Fang and Moonlight Sword being two of those. Sword magic is the ability to shoot unique spells using those swords, which is done by pressing the magic button in the middle of a sword swing. This is a bit awkward, but the timing is kinda generous at least. What's less generous are the unwritten requirements for using it. You need to be at the highest "class" in order to use sword magic, and even then, that's only for the two lesser magic swords. To shoot spells from the two best swords you need to have your strength and magic at 80 or above. The information in that last sentence is so obscure that you're unlikely to find it in most online game guides. Yet, the sword magic from the Moonlight Sword is the only thing that can hurt the final boss. This is insane, but also hard to fully appreciate without knowing the deranged nonsense required to even get near the boss.
Getting to the boss room is a convoluted mess. For how dangerous the fifth floor is, it's easily the smallest. Yet, you aren't going to make any progress in it unless you take a very specific and obscure path. Starting in the hallway leading to the dragon room, you need to go through a false wall on one side of the hall. This immediately brings you to a large chasm. The harp doesn't work here, which means you have to use the invisible walkway. If you hadn't found the one other, entirely optional, invisible walkway earlier then you would have no idea that it could even exist. The only hint you have is the presence of torches extending in a double line at the bottom of the chasm, which could potentially mean any number of things. Assuming you do make a leap of faith, going straight will only take you to a dead-end room. You have to stop in the middle of the chasm and turn right to go up some invisible stairs to a teleporter. From there you end up in a room with a bunch of hilariously oversized enemies wandering around. This room has two other teleporters, one of which takes you to a side room that dumps you back into the middle of the fifth floor and the other takes you to the room before the boss. That room contains four of the most powerful enemies in the game, who will kill you even if you have the best equipment. You need to run past those jerks while they throw nukes at you. Getting past that, there's a bridge over another chasm with fireball traps constantly shooting across it. Fireballs shouldn't hurt much at this point, but their presence encourages you to accidentally throw yourself into the void. After that, you finally reach the boss room.
This is the only hint you get to use the Moonlight Sword
This place is a small area with a chasm between you and the boss itself, which is an evil tree. There are also magic shooting traps saturating the half of the room closest to the boss, there's a single pillar in the middle of the back half of the room, with only a narrow space between it and the chasm you would have just crossed. The boss itself shoots nukes, fireballs, and monsters at you when you aren't standing in the middle of the magic traps and will whack at you when you are. Existing anywhere in the room that isn't behind the pillar involves taking constant and significant damage. You can't attack the boss directly with your weapon, which encourages you to use magic, but none of the normal magic spells do any damage to the boss. You only figure this out after firing magic at it for too long. The Moonlight Sword's magic is the only way to damage the thing, which you have no way of knowing. I went through almost all of my healing items trying to throw magic at it for at least ten minutes. The thing is, I knew about the 60 stat requirement for sword magic, but I didn't know about the 80 requirement. Because of this, I thought the sword magic was just busted in my copy of the game. Turns out I had my magic stat at 81 and my strength at 79, which put me right below the threshold. I didn't realize this until people watching my stream found an old forum post explaining the 80 stat requirement. I went back to the giant enemy room to grind for like three minutes to get myself above the threshold, made my way back to the boss, and killed it in less than a minute. This is unforgiveable boss design. It would be just to the left of impossible to beat this game without access to online resources or a like-minded peer group. Yet, before I get into the total quality of this experience, we need to make one last digression.
Fun Fun Level Design Corner
It'll be useful to stop every now and then to examine the evolution of FromSoft's level design philosophy. As this is their first game, there isn't a ton of personality beyond standard dungeon design concepts. Though, that makes this the ideal baseline from which we can judge later titles. Also, there's only five levels in this thing and looking at each of them won't take that long.
Before getting into it, the specific maps we'll be referencing were apparently published back in 2004 by someone named Martin Ramirez, and they were drawn by his then 9-year-old daughter, Sam, as they played through an old, imported copy of the game and using the opportunity to practice Japanese reading comprehension. It's a surprisingly heartwarming little story, and since these are still the best maps available most people who have played this thing in the last 20 years owe them a debt of gratitude. Wherever Martin or Sam are, I salute them.
Floor 1:
The first floor is divided into roughly six zones. First, there's the starting area in the bottom left corner, which is mostly devoid of enemies and also contains most of the NPCs in the game. The main shop and healing fountain are located directly across a hall from each other, and the church area is in its own room off on the left. The first place a new player will likely encounter combat is either the cave system in the bottom right or the two room areas in the center of the map. Two of the zones are initially locked off behind Star Key doors and need to be accessed the long way through the upper right cave system. We can see the spot where you get the chalice at the far end of the bottom caves and its receptacle at the end of the top cave. Also, the fountain is on the opposite part of the map from the chalice receptacle, and there's little-to-no in-game indication that any of it is related to each other. We can also see that second shop at the other extreme end of the upper caves, and that's where you need to fork over way too much cash to buy the cross for the priest in the far-left room. Finally, the switch to turn off the trap blocking the centrally located level exit is all the way at the end of the upper zone, which is the first major graveyard area and also the location of the infinite spider spawner.
Putting the item and delivery locations so far apart is supposed to encourage the player to wander around the level multiple times in confusion. The idea might be that this wandering would give the player more opportunity to notice the false walls, grab treasure in all the various nooks and crannies, and accrue enough levels to survive the second floor. You're probably supposed to figure out what you're doing by the time you exit this floor, even if it takes several hours. I have to imagine that most people wouldn't get past the awkward combat, maddening obscurity, or slow pace of this floor, unless they had to for weird reasons like me. Regardless, this is the least hostile layout in the game, with the fewest traps and false walls. That gets ramped up on the next floor.
Floor 2:
As with the previous floor, the central T-shaped hallway is devoid of violence, giving easy access to the level exits and save room. There's much more of a hub-and-spoke layout here than you typically see in FromSoft games. We have another six zones branching off from the central hall, with all but two being disconnected from each other, and even then, that one connection between the upper and lefthand sections is barely worth consideration for how involved it is to unlock. This floor also features the first magic upgrade and three out of the five invisible/harp bridges in the game. You're supposed to have figured out all the quirks and hostile inclinations in the game design by the time you get through this floor.
At first blush, it looks like all you need to do is go through the bridge maze and caves in the upper right to get the harp and then across the central chasm to the level exit. Each of the other zones are important to either get the two elemental stones (at the far end of the upper middle graveyard maze and in a random offshoot of the lower right cave system) and two optional but actually necessary power-ups. First, the wizard at the far end of the lower right caves is the one we discussed earlier who wants THE TRUTH. Second, you need to get a key from the right-center series of rooms to access the large lefthand area, the bottom of which features an item that lets you teleport to the current floor entrance, making backtracking so much more feasible. Getting everything that you either need or need will require full and thorough exploration. This was likely an assumed skill for players of those early cRPGs that this game spiritually references. Finally, note the reduction in save points (crosses) to three from four on the previous level. Part of the difficulty curve here is going to be the throttling of save locations.
Floor 3:
This is the first floor with no significant safe areas. There are also only five zones here compared to the six in the previous floors. Those zones are the entrance area in the bottom left, the shrine gate area in the upper left, the main loop of the level comprising the middle and lower right zones, and a false wall maze in the upper right that is unlocked after slotting those elemental stones. That area is optional because the main reason to go there is that wavy sword you see in the picture; this sword is superseded by the super-duper-secret Triple Fang that you can see hidden beyond three consecutive false walls sticking out of a random hallway in the shrine. If you don't see it, the Triple Fang is the dumb looking sword that literally has three blades sticking out of the hilt. The inclusion and placement of that sword is the kind of thing you usually see done by novice dungeon designers, since having it breaks the back third of the game and it's almost impossible to find naturally.
Going back to that main loop, the middle-right zone is where you learn the second piece of offensive magic, which has no other prerequisites than wandering into the room. Also, the final two elemental stones are found in this loop, making thorough exploration of these areas a requirement. You can see another Truth Mirror hanging out in the middle of nothing in the upper bridge area. This is the final place in the game where you can use the harp, so I guess that item's utility doesn't last long. Make note again of the scarcity and distance between save points, and the tedious distance between the level entrance in the lower left and the exit in the upper center. The game really wants you to take the next floor in one go.
Floor 4:
That brings us to this mess. There are really only four zones on this level, and they form a straightforward progression going from the upper-left counterclockwise to the upper-right and then down the central hallway, which is at the end of the level instead of the beginning. This is an incredibly linear level with copy-pasted rooms designed to disorient and turn around the player. Notice in the upper-left zone that south-to-north hallway with dropdowns that act as an early noob reset for anyone trying to explore around. Remember that the previous floors train the player to explore around. The bottom zone is filled with traps and high-level monsters, making it the most tedious slog in the entire game. Your reward for getting through that is to do the upper right zone, which is identical to the upper left. Keep in mind that all the treasures you see in those two upper zones are blocked off with instant death traps, which can only be overcome by the boots you see on the right side of the central hallway. Also, notice that the three save rooms are positioned at the end of the three linear zones, creating an intended run-based progression through each zone. All of this would be an enormous hassle and difficulty spike without the Triple Fang.
At the end of this Maze of Death, you get to the central hallway, which is filled with endgame enemies. The north end has the extremely necessary final key, the side rooms have those boots and your dad's sword, and the south has the unassuming miniboss room. The floor ends in that left-of-center hallway connecting a shortcut to the first floor with the level exit. That last bit is surprisingly humane, giving you a direct path from the shops and fountain to the endgame. That's why this level seems so schizophrenic. The initial trip through the floor is the most mean-spirited and unsubtle section of the game, but you get a nice little quality of life shortcut at the end. It's all painfully amateurish. Even though this is the most hateful layout, that doesn't mean it's a shittiest. That takes us to the endgame.
Floor 5:
The last floor is significantly smaller than the previous ones and can be divided into three zones. The first zone in the upper part of the floor is the last exploration area of the game, but it's also filled with miniboss enemies that are eager to kill you, and most of the items aren't really worth the trouble. There's also a save point in an alcove, but since it's largely unprotected from the combat area it's more of a good place to get caught in a death loop. The next zone directly below that is a series of hallways filled with those previously mentioned enemies and nuke spells. You can't really catch a breath until you make it to the far-right side with the only viable save point and the dragon room. Receiving the Moonlight Sword from the dragon is, as stated earlier, necessary to beat the game. At this point there is a subtle implication that you should go back through the previous floors unlocking all of the previously inaccessible chests and doors to get the endgame equipment. While you could go straight from the dragon to the boss room, you can't beat that boss without 80 Strength and Magic, so you're likely gonna have to grind regardless. Not that you would know any of this, or likely even make it this far, playing it casually.
This at last brings us to the inexplicable design of the section leading to the boss. From that final save point, you're supposed to go to the previous room, walk north through a false wall, with no indication that it's there, and cross an invisible bridge over the chasm you find on the other side. To reiterate, anyone doing an unresearched playthrough wouldn't have been given any indication that invisible walkways are even a thing, unless you had stumbled on that optional bridge earlier. Since the harp doesn't do anything here the only way to figure it out naturally would be to yeet yourself into the void or burn a phantom rod, if you even have any left. For as harebrained as this is, it gets worse. You see that there are two destinations across the chasm, in front and on the right. You need to use the righthand exit, which involves lining yourself up in the middle of the invisible walkway and going up some invisible stairs. This is the second leap of faith in a row, because why not. That teleporter takes you to the room with hilariously oversized enemies, which is the last grinding spot of the game. There are two exit teleporters in corners that look identical, and with the limited draw distance and the need to dodge around those enormous idiots, it's very easy to get turned around and go through the wrong exit. Fortunately, you can immediately reenter a teleporter after going through it, but you're likely to drop down the noob reset on the left side of the floor at least once.
Going through the correct teleporter takes you to a hall with four of the highest-level enemies in the game who like to throw around nuke spells like it's going out of style. This gauntlet of everything constantly exploding is harrowing for the player and the game's framerate, with the real kicker being that you have to run through it every time you retry the boss. Then there's the final bridge with the fireballs and the tiny boss arena at the very bottom. Considering the previously described boss design, this entire final sequence is deranged in a way that I can't parse. The sensibilities here seem to be on the same level as masocore Mario Maker levels. More than anything else, this final floor lays bare the rushed and amateurish nature of this game. If someone pulled this kind of design while DMing a D&D dungeon, they probably wouldn't be encouraged to DM again. That brings us to the final question.
Reference Material
This game would be unplayable without outside resources, and for full transparency here are the guides and other information I used to play this game:
After that exhaustive description, and in context of how the Japanese game market reacted to it, I have no idea what to make of this thing. It makes perfect sense why Sony and game reviewers would have seen this and been unenthused. It's janky, runs badly, has miserable combat, and is too obscure for its own good. Most of the technical and gameplay problems can likely be attributed to the purely polygonal nature of the game. No one had made one of these with polygonal monsters and NPCs, likely because of how resource intensive it is. That gimmick would have hogged development time, disc space, and compute cycles to an extent that would require sacrificing additional depth in game mechanics, storytelling, and level sophistication. This is clearly a work by enthusiastic amateurs who loved bad old 80's RPGs, and smart money would have bet on it being a failure. In this day and age, a game like this would be self-published on Steam and die in mediocre obscurity.
So, why did it resonate with a profitable niche of Japanese gamers? If we're to accept the 200,000 sales number of this thing by the release of King's Field II, then the back-of-napkin estimate for gross revenue would be somewhere around $10 million, give or take. Fromsoft would have seen some percentage of this after everyone else took their cuts, but they still would have come into possession of several hundred million yen over those six months. Being a small company, that might have been more revenue than Zin would have seen over any six months in the company's eight-year history. From their point of view, investing further into video games would have been the obvious move, and hoo-boy did they do exactly that. But what were those 200,000 customers thinking? There's evidence of a disproportionate amount of talk going on in internet chat rooms, and that word of mouth is credited for the game's success. That brings us back to what people would have seen in this wretched little dungeon crawler.
I've put too much time and effort into trying to come up with an answer. At this moment, I think it has to do with the psychological strings tugged by abstruse games. Hidden content was the normal design philosophy in the early NES days. You know how Super Mario Bros had secret warp rooms and inconspicuous power-up blocks? How about the hidden cave/dungeon entrances in The Legend of Zelda? This goes all the way back to the mystery conditions needed to collect items and power-ups in Tower of Druaga. Game companies worked under the assumption that their target audience would obsessively replay games if they thought there were hidden goodies to find. That audience was overwhelmingly made up of boys in late pre-pubescence and early adolescence. Not being a child psychologist, I can't dig into that any further. That's not saying these games couldn't appeal to other demographics if they were well-made or popular enough to enter the mainstream. However, that psychological mechanism works, and it wouldn't have gone away just because game design had started drifting towards appeal to wider audiences.
King's Field is, if anything, a love letter to bad 80's game design. I think the kinds of boys and young men that those design standards were meant to appeal to discovered and latched onto this game. Mind you, that's only a couple hundred thousand people, which would have been a respectably sized fanbase in 1985 but not as much in 1995. As a spoiler for the next entry in this series, the King's Field series didn't exactly increase in popularity from game to game, so maybe the actual fanbase was closer to 100,000 people with the rest being suckers like me who fell for word-of-mouth.
I couldn't find any promotional materials, so here's the funniest take imaginable
Another factor to consider would have been the paucity of dungeon crawlers available on consoles. The only other game even close to this which would have been contemporaneously available on next gen consoles is Crime Crackers, which barely counts. The next dungeon crawler, Space Griffon VF-9, came out a month later but was also a very different thing. Really, you don't see another one of these until Virtual Hydlide and King's Field II in mid-1995. This is an extremely cursed line-up, so I can see how anyone wanting a dungeon crawler would have landed on this game in the early months of the generation. I know I'm reusing my theory for the success of the original Hydlide, but timing makes and breaks all kinds of media products. Speaking of Hydlide, and I apologize for not including a content warning, even though this game is less janky, mechanically deeper, and overall plays better than Virtual Hydlide, I think I would prefer that tire fire of a game over this. With that game, there's about 30 minutes of misery and then two or three hours of messing around, whereas here there are multiple hours of misery at the beginning and end of a 8-9 hour experience. Mind you that both cases involve referencing guides. The appeal of both also makes use of the same kind of mind virus, you become From-pilled in a similar mechanism as becoming Hydlide-pilled. It's the same itch in the back of my brain. Once you figure out what's going on in a bad game, and know how to solve for those problems, you can have a good time given a tedious enough personality.
I'm not going to touch on the hot buzzwords surrounding modern FromSoft games, such as difficulty, fairness, or 'git gud'. There will be plenty of opportunities to wallow in the intellectual muck of those topics, and I plan on doing so repeatedly as we look at the FromSoft catalog. For now, there are more games to suffer through and only so many hours in the day. The next entry in this series will either be on King's Field II on its own or with the addition King's Field III, depending on how much I have to say. I'm not going to make any promises on a set schedule for these things, so it'll happen when it happens. No matter how long it takes, by the time I catch up with the present day, I will be able to tell the world in minute detail why, in fact, all FromSoft games are bad.
Sources
Background info was cobbled together from the following sources:
I'm streaming myself as I play through all these FromSoft games and other antiquated garbage, which can be found on my Twitch channel. Stream archives can be found on my YouTube channel. The first part of my King's Field playthrough (overlaid with inane chatter) can be watched below.
1995 turned over into 1996 and the world kept spinning. Global events were exactly what you would expect from the 90's, with post-Soviet chaos and a rising pitch of terrorism in southwest Asia. Serious, grown-up political news in the U.S. was as vapid and stupid as at any other time in the Clinton/Gingrich era, though Ted Kaczynski got himself got during this time. In pop culture, Hollywood put out a long string of notable movies, including massive hits like Twister, The Rock, Mission: Impossible, and that year's entry in the Kingdom Hearts canon with The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though, as big as those movies were, I think we can all agree on the most important film of that year. Other than that, cable television was busy exploding into the fetid hellscape we would all come to know and the less said about popular music the better.
As far as events in video games, the Amiga was finally, mercifully, dead and both of the 32-bit early adopters, The 3DO and Jaguar, would be soon to follow. This time also saw American Adventure game development fall decidedly into decline after the boom of the early 90's. This is also a low period for the cRPG genre in its lead-up to the Infinity Engine revival. PC gaming was transitioning to the era of dominance by Shooters and Strategy games, with Duke Nukem 3D and Quake releasing in the first half of '96 and the effects of the recent Warcraft II, Civilization II, and Command & Conquer coming into focus. Arcades were also beginning their multi-year decline, especially in the U.S with Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 providing one of the last few big hits for the format. It wasn't all decline, though; the console business was booming.
The Playstation and Saturn kept on selling right through and after the 1995 holidays, though the PS1 was more quickly moving off of shelves at a ratio of anywhere from 2:1 to 5:1. While most of the software released in early '96 was neither original nor inspiring, the smash hit that was Resident Evil gave existing owners something to latch onto while new owners could rely on that and the previous year's hit releases. I've seen it written that the console enjoyed a game-to-console attach rate of anywhere from 4:1 to 6:1. It got to the point that Sony had to hurriedly spin-up additional CD manufacturing in North America. From what I could gather, Sony had shipped a million systems by May, with somewhere between 1 - 1.5 million units sold by the end of June. That would make it the first or second fastest console to a million units sold at the time. We'll discuss the Saturn in its own series, and while its first year on the market wasn't great, it was still ok enough when not compared to the Playstation.
Both systems caught a boost in sales, if not profitability, when they mutually lowered their prices to $199 at E3 '96. That pricing arms race would hasten along the end of the SNES/Genesis generation by making the new hotnesses highly affordable. In fact, both of those older consoles would spend the year winding down, with the last handful of significant games for the SNES (Mario RPG, Megaman X3, Kirby Superstar, and Donkey Kong Country 3) seeing their releases in the lead-up to the N64 launch. The PS1 was quickly becoming the primary console in the market, which was an almost unparalleled success for a new entrant into the industry. At this point, I can only chalk that up to fantastic timing, rational hardware design, and a deep marketing budget. Sony took its new gaming division seriously and was poised to conquer the world video game market.
Focusing back on the main event of the season, the second E3 happened in mid-May. Other than the aforementioned price cuts, this was when Nintendo revealed the N64 and its pack-in Mario game. Like Sega, they were forced to price the new console at a rate competitive with the PS1. By the end of '96, both the Saturn and N64 would be incurring a per-system loss for their respective parent companies. This is a standard result of the tactics Sony was using. Since Playstation was one piece of a much larger conglomerate with deep pockets, they were able to position themselves as loss leaders, forcing the smaller existing companies to price match and bleed themselves dry. At some point we'll get to the well documented effects this had on Sega, but it also needs to be noted that Nintendo likely would have suffered a similar fate were it not for the overwhelming success of the Game Boy. I'm not going to go into excruciating detail about the games shown at those conventions, because we will get to them with time.
It's important to keep in mind that even though Sony did a fast and thorough job of running Sega out of the hardware market, they were not the main target.
I've ranked 101 PS1 games over the course of about 13 months. That's cool and all, but it's caused the inevitable problem that comes with such a project. Some of the early games have stuck themselves further up the list than is warranted. This is a phenomenon that occurs because some game or games become a kind of barrier for newer entrants in a way that protects those initially ranked above it. My best guess in this situation is that Cyber Sled and Hi-Octane have filled that role. The consequence of all this is that there are a few early PS1 games that have ranked waaaaay higher than they should. Usually, the answer for this is to commit to the bit and leave things as they are, but this project is of the highest scientific importance, and as such I'm going make a (hopefully) one-time adjustment. I'm going to move ten games from the top 35 downwards to more appropriate positions. I don't imagine this matters to many of you, but it matters to me, dammit! The table below summarizes this change.
Now that we've gotten our sacrilege out of the way, let's fulfill our pathological need to quantify everything. That's right, it's time for the glorious return of the BORQ! Remember that the BORQ score for any individual game is determined by taking the as-is ranking list, dividing it into quintiles, and assigning a score from 1 to 5 to the games within those quintiles. This time, because we've ranked 101 games, the quintiles are groups of 20 with the middle quintile having 21. While the inclusion of the 52 games we've seen so far in 1996 and the above mulligan have shifted some of the scores for the 1995 releases, we're not going to dig into that quite yet. Instead, we'll focus on this current batch of games and let the heavy analysis be future me's problem. (Note to my future-self reading this in preparation for 1996 GOTY: eat shit lmao)
That also means we aren't yet going to do anything with GOTY, and even if we did Resident Evil would probably be the objective pick so far. We are instead going to run the BORQ scores for these games by original system and development region like last time so that we can compare how things have gone for the PS1's software library. As such, below are the numbers for system of origin.
From an initial look, we can see that the pattern from the previous year still largely holds true. Arcade ports are by far the best, followed by original development, with PC and Multi-Platform games consistently being the worst. An odd change is the drastic improvement in 3DO ports, which were bolstered by Starblade and D. Interestingly, those are also the only two Japan developed 3DO ports that we've seen on the PS1. This might also be the last we see of the 3DO refugees, as we can see those releases trailing off going into the Summer. Additionally, I broke out the Cross Gen games from the Multi-Platform titles. I feel that at this point in the console cycle the games shared between the PS1 and Saturn are inherently different from the games shared between the SNES and newer systems. So, if I labeled a game as Cross Gen, it was also on the SNES or Genesis and if it's Multi-Platform it's only on the PS1 and Saturn. This is going to stop being an issue once we get into 1997. Feel free to draw any other conclusions you want from this analysis.
Now on to the development regions, we see the same overall trend as in '95, but with the number of releases evening out between North America and Japan and those North American games catching up in terms of quality. The exceptionally unsurprising thing is the already low quality of European games falling off a cliff with an equal number of releases as the previous year. Only three European games scored higher than a BORQ of 2, which were Striker '96, Assault Rigs, and Extreme Pinball. In contrast, of the nine games to end up with BORQs of 1, seven were European. This seems to largely be a consequence of the collapsing British game industry after the death of the Amiga. We know that the Tomb Raider and Wipeout franchises will help keep Eidos and Psygnosis relevant, and DMA Design will eventually matter. I'm personally curious what the rebounding, if any, of British console games will look like going forward. Though, even if that rebound happens, French game development will still hang around the European game industry's neck like an albatross.
Finally, we can see the quality spread across the 13 blog entries covering this time period. What's most surprising is the relative consistency from post to post, with that one major exception. When taking into account the release time periods, we can see some truth to the old stereotype of early Q1 serving as a dumping ground for trash. We can also interpret the preponderance of weeks with BORQ scores above 3.00 as indicating an overall increase in quality compared to the '95 releases; keep in mind that these scores incorporate the existence of games released before this time period. We can see this increase quantified by the overall BORQ of 3.04 for the first half of '96.
This metric will invite much deeper analysis the further we get into this project. For example, I looked into a basic analysis of these games based on genre. You aren't going to see that here, since I identified 26 unique genres in this batch of 52 games. The floodgates are going to really open in the back-half of '96, with 122 games on my list released between 7/1 and 12/31 of the year. That's going to more than double the sample we have to work with, so I'm expecting this section to get a lot deeper in the year-end round-up. Though, we have one additional, and immensely important, piece of statistical business to attend to.
Yeah, bro, SPORTS. Nothing celebrates the blood, sweat, and tears which go into athletic victory quite like sitting in your room staring at a CRT television. That's why the sports genres have always been among the most prolific and best-selling games on any system. But what can we learn about these sports from those games? Other than trivial details like game rules and strategy, we can answer the most important question in the human experience: What's the best sport? These things are all about winning, and there's no winning like topping game rankings. Of the 52 games released in the first half of '96, 14 were sports titles covering seven specific genres. A math dork would tell you that's more than a quarter of them. Since the BORQ is the single most powerful ratings system ever devised, it can finally bring us closure through A RANKING OF SPORTS. The sports represented by those 14 games can are ranked below.
This is a sad day for America, and thus the world. This table is saying that Soccer is the best sport and Baseball the second worst. The BORQ is inarguably correct in all things, but we need to look at more than just these games, this has to be a fluke. What happens when we add the previous years' 8 games to the list?
This is just as bad. There's nothing less American than Canada and there's nothing more Canadian than Hockey. What's this with Football and Baseball in the bottom half? Has the world finally fallen to communism? At least we can all agree that the Olympics sucks. The second half of '96 better clean up this mess.
Mid-1996 was a momentous time for the PS1 in North America, because SCEA finally bit the bullet and began allowing games to be shipped in CD jewel cases. As such, the last weeks of June saw a crossover where some games were in long boxes and others in jewel cases. By the time we get to Fall, the changeover will be complete, and we will finally be able to consider American covers in our BAOTY discussions. That's still a way off, however. For now, I want to showcase some of the truly abysmal box art that cursed store shelves in the first half of '96. As such, I present to you the LONG BOX HALL OF SHAME!
Box Art Most Likely To Frighten Its Target Audience: Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
Box Art That Should Not Have Used In-Game Assets: Destruction Derby, Shellshock
Box Art That SHOULD Have Used In-Game Assets: In The Hunt
Box Art Depicting The Last Thing You'll See If You Cheat At Baseball: Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Ports That Should Have Used Their Original Box Art: Doom, Fade to Black
*Very Loud Incorrect Buzzer*: Loaded, College Slam, Silverload
I honestly did not expect to make it this far. This blogging project will go on leave next week to prepare for the next round of Saturn games, which will take us up to the end of June with that system. We will also continue our descent into madness with the 3DO in about three weeks, and we'll see about getting through all of the Jaguar's 1994 games as a break from the 3DO. This should easily take us through to the end of 2023. We're likely a good 14-18 months away from getting to the end of 1996 for all five contemporary consoles, and that will mark the end of the first phase for this generation.
For the time being, in two weeks we'll look at the April 1996 Saturn releases of X-Men: Children of the Atom, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and Guardian Heroes. That might end up being the highest quality week thus far. The week after that, we'll go to our last batch of explicable 3DO games, with Off-World Interceptor, Strahl, Shanghai: Triple-Threat, Starblade, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Slayer.
Gives a new meaning to getting your back wall blown out
College Slam
Name a worse video filter. Go on, I'll wait.I know I've already used it, I just wanted you to see this again
Alien Trilogy
Glad to see the Zombie Marines accurately represented from the movie
Psychic Detective
Well, that's a lost cause
Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
My favorite part of the book was when Liu Bei gathered the dragon balls and summoned Shenron
Descent
With maps like these, who needs enemies?
In the Hunt
I just think this game looks cool
Bottom of the 9th
OH GOD YOUR FACE
PO'ed
Eat.Drink.Yum
Return Fire
Yes, this password system does make me want to curl up and die
Battle Arena Toshinden 2
You know this model wasn't paid enoughPolygonal necks are hard
Silverload
Context doesn't make this better
Bust-A-Move 2: Arcade Edition
Bub doesn't like what he sees in there
Top Gun: Fire at Will!
They literally reused the opening scene from the movieHow dare you sass me in my virtual officeOur intrepid cast of non-entitiesWhat you think is going on here makes more sense than the actual sceneThe worst sin this game commits is its complete lack of homoerotic tension
V-Tennis
Ah yes, my favorite tennis player
A-Train
Thank you, Maintenance Man
Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
I just like the way this game looks
NAMCO Museum Vol. 1
AMCABThe horrifying implications of Pac-Man living in a house shaped like his head
Epidemic
Neurol
International Track & Field
SET
Fade to Black
THEY SEND YOU TO NEW ALCATRAZ
Shellshock
UhHaven't done the first mission and he's already disappointed in youNeeds more dakkaThe dissolution of Yugoslavia is a great setting for hijinks 5 Comments
There were two immutable constants in the mid 90's, Genki and Rail Shooters. Now, we witness those two tireless engines of mediocrity come together. Burning Soldier was Genki's first foray on the 3DO, and for it they made something that was simultaneously out of their wheelhouse and the most obvious thing ever, an FMV first-person Rail Shooter. Imagine the x-wing sections from Rebel Assault and you'll get the idea.
With this being from the same writer as the Kileak (pronounced "kill-eek") games, you should by now expect this thing to have overly involved and underutilized lore. It's less so the case here than in later titles, but you can see the buds of that proclivity begin to blossom. As the story goes, the year is 2095 and aliens have invaded earth for reasons. You control a human space fighter that can transform into a mech, because of course. You fight those alien bastards through the solar system before descending to the skies above Tokyo and eventually an underground base. It's a straightforward 'shmup plot, but with unnecessary details thrown in, such as why you're only just now showing up, the fate of a human colony on Mars, and specific names for each of the large alien ships. The hyper-serious narration does a lot to underscore the inherent unseriousness of the writing, and I'm here for it.
Hope you like d-pad cursor movement
The gameplay on the other hand leaves a whole lot to be desired. This plays exactly as it looks. You are flown through a pre-rendered CG environment while aiming around the screen with a reticule and shooting anything that doesn't look like a background element. That aiming, done with the d-pad, has bad feeling acceleration and is generally imprecise. When the shooting is both bad and the only mechanic, that sinks the whole experience. There's some rudimentary checkpointing every few levels, from which you can continue after dying. This is all standard stuff, and the in-level set pieces aren't interesting enough to justify the slog. I made it a little under halfway through the game in my half-hour spent playing it. The only part of any note is the generic EDM soundtrack. There's so little to say about this game that I'm gonna stop.
For some reason the 1993 film Demolition Man is more in the cultural zeitgeist in 2023 than at any other point in the last 20 year. I don't know how it happened, but it's probably caused by some damn fool thing on social media. Regardless of how or why it's reentered the conversation, it's still a prime example of absurdist action-comedy. Also like every other big movie of the 90's, it received video game tie-ins. Most of the releases are standard 2D Side Scrollers, but not the 3DO version, oh no, they had plans for this one.
The SNES and Genesis were only capable of rendering low-res sprites and as such the games mostly were either side scrollers or top-down action games, the same as games had been since the mid-80's. Virgin, like other leading lights in the industry, wanted to make a game of the future for Demolition Man, which was a movie about the future. What were the most cutting-edge techniques available in 1993-'94? That's right, FMV. The plan was to fully transport the player into the story of supercop John Spartan using live action footage seamlessly integrated into the gameplay. They would do all of this utilizing the brand-new and overwhelming capacity of CD gaming on that 3DO thing. The idea practically sells itself!
There are too many jokes to make about the gameplay
In reality, Alexandria, inc. spent more than a year struggling to get a functioning interactive experience completed and out the door. While it would have seemed like a godsend to have access to the movie's main actors for green screen stunt reels, it also created limitations on enacting any changes to the game mid-development. Famously, Virgin had access to Sly Stallone and Wesley Snipes during production of the movie, and were able to capture a variety of green screen footage of them directly off the movie set. No other movie tie-in game had gotten that level of access and cooperation from the source production, and it must have seemed like a massive win for the developers. Thing is, that kind of deal wouldn't get you access to the actors for the entirety of production, so you only have what you first get. I don't know if this was a major contributing factor to this subsequent disaster of a video game, but I don't think it would have helped.
There are also too many jokes to make about the HUD
It doesn't matter how much you can walk around a movie studio lot; you still need to at least attempt to make a good game, which this very much is not. That's not to say it isn't interesting. I suppose the developers wanted to make the gameplay in any given section match the action of the movie as much as possible, and as such, this thing jumps around between four different genres throughout its runtime. These are: Light Gun Shooter, Fighting, First Person Shooter, and a weird one-off Driving section. With only two exceptions, the action and cutscenes make use of original green screen clips, movie footage, or digitized sprites for all characters. While that may have been novel, the gameplay in each of those sections is individually atrocious. The aiming in the Light Gun sections is nightmarish on the d-pad, the fighting is borderline unplayable, the FPS levels run at the worst possible framerate and look as bad as something like Iron Angel of the Apocalypse. I'm not even going to discuss the Driving section.
I personally made it about a quarter of the way through the game due to the massively hostile lives system. Even though multimedia is the future, this thing follows the old game design standard of making the experience unreasonably hard and punishing to cover for the fact that there's only an hour of total content. Also, the FMV during that hour isn't even good. The movie clips are hella compressed and the digital environments around the green screened characters are very early 90's and not even a little bit comped to the lighting and resolution of the live action footage. FMV games had that problem all the time, but it's worse here because they went through all the trouble to waste Stallone and Snipes' time. This thing is certainly an oddity, and while I'd warn against playing it, if you have the sickness you should look up a playthrough to see the weirdness.
In contrast to the previous game, Jammit is an up-ported SNES/Genesis game. This thing is a barebones 1v1 Basketball game with a street sports aesthetic. You choose between three players and a few functionally identical street courts. Other than two-player, there isn't a ton to do here. On top of that the actual gameplay doesn't feel good, with shooting and blocking handled awkwardly. The best thing I can say is that there is a well-defined sense of style, though I'll let someone else judge the quality of that style. For me, this thing likely falls into "hello fellow children" type of fake streetitude. It also very obviously looks like a Genesis game, and it seems that the developers did nothing to make use of the 3DO hardware or CD format. This is such an insignificant piece of nothing that I don't have more than one paragraph of commentary about it.
They might have overdone the aesthetic. This is downright apocalyptic.
The one interesting tidbit I did find was related to the development house, GTE Interactive. They were a short-lived subsidiary of GTE, which I guess was a big telecom in California for most of the twentieth century. Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996, they had the idea that cable providers would be the video game distributors of the future and set up GT Interactive to get in early on game publishing. They self-produced Jammit and a few other nothing street sports titles on consoles before pivoting to publishing weird PC games, such FX Fighter and that Titanic game with the bizarre photo-scanned faces. That pivot didn't last long because and that 1996 law sent most U.S. telecoms into a spiral via deregulation. GTE shut down their games subsidiary almost immediately and by the turn of the century they would be forced into a merger with Bell to create Verizon. It's kind of an odd story, and we're not going to hear from these guys again in this blogging project.
Regardless, this game is the most middlingly neutral experience I've yet to encounter on this system, and as such I will begin using it as a dividing line between 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' 3DO games going forward.
Time to Fighting Like A Drunken Rice Peddler: 33 Minutes
Speaking of unacceptable experiences, we get our first of way too many Tom Zito games that got released on the 3DO. In fact, about half of Digital Pictures' joints saw either ports or first releases on this shambling atrocity of a console, with the rest quarantined to the Sega CD. This is likely to be either their sixth or seventh game during their four-year run of solvency, and somehow, it's the least playable one I have yet seen. Oh, and if you're keeping count, I'm not including those music video things as legitimate video games. There's a lot of unpacking to do, so buckle in.
Supreme Warrior is an Interactive Movie that attempts to play like a first-person Action game. The meat of the experience is the 14 1-on-1 fistfights with FMV stuntpeople wearing silly outfits. These fights are theoretically accomplished by reading tells in your opponent's performance and using the correct attack at the correct moment in the footage. Even after reading the manual and going through the tutorial videos in the game, this is much easier said than done. It feels like the actors you're fighting against are mainly just vamping at the camera and the opening flags were programmed in to fit as closely as possible. The result feels confused and half-assed, which is a shame because this looks like it was the highest budget Zito game we've yet seen. That last point takes us, sadly, to discussing the premise and production of this thing.
Pretty much unplayable
While the interaction is the absolute worst thing about the game, that doesn't mean everything else is without issue. Like Digital Pictures' earlier narratives, the premise here takes an existing B-movie genre and tries to add interactivity on top of it. In this case, we get an incredibly arch Hong Kong Action movie story. The game opens on a generic late medieval Chinese village under attack by wacky kung fu bandits. The local kung fu master is too old to fight and his spunky apprentice is not yet ready, so you're tasked with beating up the four bandit lords and their main henchmen. It's a straightforward set-up, but the game spends a whole lot of time explaining it. All that talking is primarily done by that aforementioned apprentice, portrayed by reliable 90's character actress Vivian Wu, who fills the Person Who Talks At You role for the entirety of the experience. While her and everyone else's performances are adequate for what would have been asked of them, the concept itself is questionable.
The big thing is that the plot is tepid and lame, with all the gravitas and sense of stakes you could expect from a community theater performance. What's a bit trickier is the ethics of a bunch of Americans from California doing what seems to be a spoof of Chinese movies. I was prepared to really get into it, but after doing some poking around, Zito and friends apparently gained cooperation from a prominent Hong Kong film studio to use their sets. Also, a lot of the creative talent behind this had backgrounds in martial arts and stunt work. So, they seem to have made a sincere effort, even if the end result is cheap and kind of boring.
It costs a lot to look this cheap
That goes to my earlier comment on this likely being the costliest Digital Pictures game. There's wire work, pyrotechnics, stunt choreography, cheesy special effects, multiple sets, and a bunch of extras. That's a lot of effort to put into something that would eventually be compressed down to 3DO FMV resolutions. I think I would even go as far as to say that it was largely a wasted effort. Between this and the contemporary Corpse Killer, I can see how this studio went bankrupt as quickly as it did. It doesn't matter if you put the effort in to produce direct-to-VHS quality footage for a game if the gameplay at the core of it sucks. If I had the inclination, I could really dig into the that gameplay with all of the input and systems choices that went into it, because this thing could likely act as a cautionary tale on every possible level. That's damning for the entire Interactive Movie concept, because even when they put in real budget, creativity, and effort to make one of these, it still turns out bad. This genre was doomed from the start, and they were fast approaching that reckoning by the time this game came out.
Time to Getting Hadoukened At High Speed: 20 Minutes
Hey kids, have you heard of Street Fighter II? Oh, you saw someone play Street Fighter IV when you were little? Ok. Well, that game was obviously in a long-running series. The second game in that series is the reason why anyone cares about it, and that game originally came out all the way back in 1991! Yes, I know that was a long time ago. Anyway, one of the special things about that game was that it got updated a bunch of times in the three years after it came out. No, not like modern games. See, it was an arcade game, so a whole new physical copy had to be made and distributed with every update. Oh, right, arcades were places which would have a bunch of old video games that you could pay to play one session at a time, and each game was in its own big cabinet that you would stand at. Well, it wasn't weird at the time, ok? Back on track, because it took so long to make each update, they would all have different names and be noticeably different from each other, and most arcade games didn't get updates for as long or to such an extent as Street Fighter II. Not only that, but each version of the game was ported to various consoles and PC in different ways and at different times, so keeping track of it all is real tricky. The weirdest thing about it is that the final version of the game was only ever ported to the 3DO! You have no idea what the 3DO is? Look kid, I don't have all day.
Yep, definitely Street Fighter II
Young'uns these days don't know how good they have it. If my awkward skit didn't clue you in, the 3DO received the only contemporary home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which added onto the updates from Super while rolling back in the fast game speed from Turbo. This would have been the definitive edition of this game that Capcom's successor series (Darksiders, X-men, and Street Fighter Alpha) would build from. Even though interest for the game had died down by the time this release hit arcades, it's still important and influential. That makes the facts around this port hilarious, because getting a 3DO release means it might as well not have been ported at all.
Not that it's a bad port, this is a completely adequate version of the game. The 3DO was perfectly capable of rendering graphics on par with Capcom's CP System II board. There are apparently some minor omissions compared to the arcade original, but it seems like there wasn't a better home port of this game until the 30th anniversary collection. That's probably kind of significant. As for my time playing it…I've never had a handle on Street Fighter II. I had an ok time with Alpha and later games in the series, but I could never get into this one. As such, I only poked around the surface to make sure it wasn't a tire fire. I'm grateful that this is the only time I'll have to encounter SFII in this blogging project.
That does it for this week's 3DO games. I was a bit too ambitious about the timeline for getting this post out, so I'll just stick to one post a week for the time being. My own workflow issues aside, this was a far more explicable batch of games than last time. Maybe developers just needed an extra year of lead time to make functioning video games for this console. Whatever the case may be, let's update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and get out of here.
1. Road Rash
…
6. Super Street Fighter II Turbo
11. Burning Soldier
19. Jammit
25. Demolition Man
27. Supreme Warrior
…
34. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties
Next week we'll return to the PS1 as we look back at the games released for that system in the first half of 1996 with our mid-year round-up.
I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
We've now reached the final few games of June, and will be wrapping up our time with the PS1 in the second quarter of 1996. We've encountered something of a parting shot from European game developers, so let's take our punishment in stride as we look at Olympic Summer Games, True Pinball, Fade to Black, and Shellshock.
Time to We'd Expect More From An Athlete Of His Level: 39 Minutes
I promised more Olympics games and here we are. There are only so many things a developer can do with this format, and we're already running into those limits with this game. Though, I've found the sparse background information on this thing to be more interesting than the end product itself.
I have a negative Pavlovian reaction to seeing U.S. Gold in the Publisher column, considering the truly godawful products they put out for the PS1 and Saturn leading up to this point. So, I finally went and did a little bit of poking. Turns out that company had been in the business of importing American PC games to Britain in the 80's. That would have made sense as an arbitrage opportunity in the pre-DOS world, and they found success doing so. By the time the 90's rolled around they had branched out into original publishing of British developed games onto the Amiga and Sega platforms. That's how we've, sadly, wound up seeing their name on various games published in North America. The interesting part is where Olympic Summer Games comes in. This is one of the first games worked on by Silicon Dreams, which was the name given to the internal development team spun up by U.S. Gold's owners. This would have been a logical next step for them as a publishing house, except with the twist that U.S Gold would cease to exist by the end of 1996. They had been bought by Eidos back in April and were in the process of liquidation by the time this game came out. Though, one of the founders of U.S. Gold turned around and repaid some of their buyout money to reacquire the Silicon Dreams team. He would then run it as an independent studio pumping out Soccer games until finally giving up the ghost in 2003. This is a small and kinda obscure story, but it's one piece of the larger picture that was the collapse and consolidation of British game development in the 90's.
Borderline unplayable
As for Olympic Summer Games, it's a miserably terrible experience. The basic gameplay works similarly to Konami's Track & Field games, but worse. Additionally, the minigame design is extremely spotty, it's significantly uglier than International Track & Field, and the few innovations it offers are either poorly implemented or wrong-headed. There are 15 events here, including the standard running, jumping, and throwing minigames with the addition of a couple of shooting events, fencing, and weightlifting. The controls are supposedly simple, but the UI in the events themselves sometimes makes it extremely unclear what it is you're supposed to do. This leads to frustration in addition to the hand pain. Matters aren't helped by the biggest decision around how the events are presented. There are 30 competitors for every event: the player and 29 AI jerks. The default setting of this game is to show every entrant's performance in every round of every event. Even skipping past the AI's turns, it still causes the events to drag out interminably. There also isn't any way to quit mid-event, so you end up stuck in your own personal hell of watching this game play itself. Did I mention how bad this thing looks? The audio design is also largely mediocre, with the handful of canned announcer lines getting old very quickly.
As for positive points, I guess the marksmanship event is kinda neat. It's a tightly timed target shooting minigame where the reticule jumps after every shot. There are also an abundance of game modes, even if they all basically involve identical gameplay. I think that's it. U.S. Gold likely made the previous gen versions of this game first and tried to shove polygonal graphics into that framework. That's what I'll tell myself, at least.
Next, we have another genre that is difficult to write about: Virtual Pinball. We've already looked at a couple of these, Last Gladiators and Extreme Pinball, and both are underwhelming, to put it nicely. The good news is that True Pinball offers the most realistic pinball experience so far, the bad news is that it's massively uninteresting.
There are four generic tables on offer in this package, which seems to be the standard for these things, Law & Justice, Babewatch, Extreme Sports, and Vikings. I wasn't joking about the generic part. I would normally rank the tables, like I did for the last two of these, but there's so little differentiation in the experience that I physically couldn't. I guess Babewatch is the best table, for what that's worth. Other than the basically ok table designs, the ball physics seems to work well enough, though this thing experiences the perennial problem of only showing part of the table you're playing and panning up and down following the ball. It largely looks fine enough, except for some wonky polygonal effects on the Law & Justice table. Let's see, what else…it has sound, which is something, and the menu design makes me irrationally angry for reasons I don't fully grasp. I have nothing further to add, reviewing these Pinball games is going to get increasingly difficult as we go on.
Somehow the best table
So, with more space to fill, let's talk about Ocean. This is another British publisher of similar lineage to Psygnosis and U.S. Gold, and like those companies it did not survive the fall of the Amiga without being bought out. Whereas Psygnosis would be bought early and continue largely unmolested under Sony until the turn of the century, and U.S. Gold suffered the fate we discussed above, Ocean was in the process of being bought and merged with Infogrames at the time of this game's release. They were allowed to release products under their own name until '98 when they were fully subsumed by their French overlords. There isn't much to mourn here as, outside of Britain, Ocean was largely associated with bad licensed games, including the game with the all-time most disproportionate difference in quality between its gameplay and music. Someone who isn't me needs to do a deep analysis of the decline in the British game industry during the 90's.
Also, even though the publisher is British, the development studio for this thing, Digital Illusions, is some small weirdo Swedish development house. They largely just made Pinball games for the Amiga up until this point, and I'm sure they will never go on to do anything important ever.
Here's the thing, I've never played Flashback or Another World. I have no nostalgia for that brief window of rotoscoped side-scrolling games, such as the original Prince of Persia. I also don't imagine any of them have aged too well; even without playing them I've heard of the animation priority issues and questionable level/puzzle design. You would think that background experience should be important when playing the direct sequel to Flashback, right? Guess again! 3D game design makes all of that irrelevant; the future is now, old man.
While I don't think the plot of the first Flashback matters in any way whatsoever, I at least need to acknowledge the basics. You play as some guy named Conrad who goes through a super spy adventure on an alien planet with some Total Recall/They Live stuff going on, the end of which involves blowing up said planet and committing some casual space genocide. He flies away in a spaceship and the game ends with him going into a cryo nap, because Alien was a good movie. Now, because Aliens was also a good movie, we find our favorite space war criminal awoken from his nap fifty years later and immediately thrown in prison by the aliens whose planet he blew up. Also, those aliens have conquered Earth and that prison, named New Alcatraz because this is the most unserious plot imaginable, is on the moon. That's all the necessary information for the set-up.
I bet you're wondering how I got here
This thing is played as a behind-the-back Third Person Action game and is entirely polygonal. This will become something of a default genre for PS1 games, but we haven't seen much of it so far. In that sense, this initially feels like a much more modern game than its contemporaries. Yet, after spending a few minutes with it, you can see where the Flashback design philosophy has informed the entire experience. This thing originally came out for PCs in '95, and so its controls are informed more by that earlier French game, Alone in the Dark. That's to say this thing uses very clunky pre-Resident Evil tank controls. A lot of the clunkiness here comes from a moving forward of the motion-captured style animations pioneered by the previous games. This means animations for sidestepping, jumping, and environment interactions are canned and take a while. While that's potentially charming in 2D, it doesn't fly in this new polygonal world.
I didn't make it through the first act, which is the prison escape, because I lost patience trying to figure out what was going on with the infinite spawning enemy room. Also, this is technically supposed to be a shooter. The combat works by readying your weapon in kind of a Resident Evil way and waiting for the lock-on targeting to get a fix before shooting. There's infinite ammo, so that's not a consideration. It's barebones to the point of not serving much of a purpose. Aside from that, the puzzles aren't so much puzzles as just wandering around until you get to the next event trigger. There really isn't anything to recommend this experience. In fact, I began to actively hate the thing during a short jumping section, where you have to do horizontal jumps around patches of electrified floor. Touching those floor tiles even slightly does an instant kill, and the in-game saving is weird and awkward to the point where I would have given up if not for save states.
The worst platforming you can possibly imagine
So, playing Fade to Black is a chore and the story isn't worth consideration. If you need any more convincing of that last point, the name of the guy who busts you out of the prison cell at the beginning is named John O'Conner. It's kind of amazing how bad this thing is, though it apparently sold enough copies in PAL territories to go platinum. Yet that wouldn't do the developer much good, as DSI would have to move to creating cash-in racing games before shutting down in 2004. You shouldn't feel too sad about that, since this is also the studio that put out Shaq Fu in-between Flashback and this game. I dunno, thinking about this thing makes me kinda mad, so I'll stop.
Oh, and while "Fade to Black" is a great song, it's still maybe only my third favorite track off of Ride the Lightning.
We've finally reached the last game of June '96, and it's definitely something. We've seen Core Design before with Thunderhawk 2 the previous year, and we'll see them again with a video game worth consideration later in '96. For now, though, we have to deal with whatever it was they were trying to do with this thing.
It took a couple of minutes for me to figure out that the premise seems to be "What if the A-Team was Hip Hop." I could see that potentially working as a skit on The Chapelle Show, but this game treats itself mostly seriously. There's a narrow path where that could be fun or ok, but remember this thing was developed in frickin' Derbyshire. Semi-ironic Blaxploitation is a genre that white people should dabble in with the utmost caution or not at all. Nothing in Shellshock comes across as malicious, so it was likely a sincere but misguided effort. With all the everything around the presentation, I had a hard time putting much thought into the almost-nothing gameplay systems.
Cool
Once you get past the budget conscious opening cutscenes and hub area, you get into the game's missions. This is a very straightforward first-person tank shooter. Contemporary reviewers compared it to Battlezone, and that's basically it. The environments are semi-destructible and navigating the tank feels terrible, but otherwise it's just that. There's a massive disconnect between the effort going into the aesthetic and the effort that went into the gameplay. I'm almost reminded of Johnny Bazookatone in that regard. This game is more fleshed out and explicable than that one, but that's saying very little. There seems to be some kind of tank upgrade system that you could eventually engage with, but the act of driving and shooting the tank is so completely unenjoyable that no extra systems would have made it worthwhile. I shouldn't have expected more from a game published during U.S. Gold's death throes, but still.
Turns out the game is just this
I didn't go into detail on the characters, stylistic choices, or the voice acting because I don't know if it's my place to do so. Since Core would almost immediately go on to bigger and better things, no one at the time put much thought into this game. It was forgotten quickly enough that its whole thing has gone undiscussed, and someone should probably do that. I'm going to revisit this thing on the Saturn, so maybe I'll have something to say then.
Turns out the first half of '96 ended more with a death rattle than a bang. Regardless, we made it through. Not only that, but we also got past game #100 and passed the one-year mark of this blog series. This momentous event comes with added difficulties, mainly the item limit on the Giantbomb list feature, which means I had to put together a Google Sheet to hold the sheer girth of the Ranking of All PS1 Games. With the changeover in place, let's update that list and move on.
1. Air Combat
…
54. True Pinball
68. Shellshock
82. Fade to Black
87. Olympic Summer Games
…
101. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
There were 52 games released for the PS1 in the first six months of '96, and it's kinda been a lot. As such, we're going to take next week to stop and look back on those games in a mid-year-round-up. We'll check in with how the console war is going, run some numbers, initiate box art discourse, and more!
After next week, I'll be taking a one-week break before picking back up with the Saturn so that we can see what Sega was up to at the same time all this was happening with the PS1. We'll kick that off with the April '96 releases of X-Men: Children of the Atom, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and Guardian Heroes.
I wound up receiving only one anonymous question, which I suppose is more of a prompt:
Q: Describe your perfect sandwich.
A: This was the incorrect question to ask, as I am a person of simple tastes. Just give me meat and cheese between some bread. I’ll use this opportunity to provide a small anecdote, however. When I was younger, I worked at a university owned eatery for a couple of years, and I would make myself lunch during my federally mandated breaks. One of the things I would make was a sandwich on a kaiser roll bun that had, in order: a hamburger patty, pepper jack cheese, bacon, red onions, and pulled pork with some salt and pepper on top. My coworkers thought it was weird and named the sandwich after me. If you're wondering about the healthiness of that meal, I was young and had a strong constitution.
Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
I said we would eventually get to this point in my last post in the Saturn series, and here we are. I also promised that I would spend the intervening months trying to figure out what the deal is with the Darkstalkers franchise, which was a bold-faced lie. I still have no idea what was going on with Capcom that caused them to make three of these and then bury the series forever. That said, I'm always ready and willing to dive into one of these games for at least half an hour.
This being the first game in the series, it's more primitive in just about every way compared to Darkstalkers' Revenge. I don't hold that against the game, but that does make it weird that this console port came out after its sequel and also after Street Fighter Alpha, which is also kind of its sequel, but we'll get to that later. Or maybe not. I've seen more than one date for this game's release, and I've used the June date because I felt like it. You can also find a claim that this came out the same week that its sequel was released for the Saturn. I have no idea if that's real, but it seems that there was also a pattern in the Japanese releases where the second came out before the first as well. Not to mention SF Alpha came out before either of these in both Japan and North America, but I'm getting ahead of myself again.
Going at it like cats and dogs
So, what is Darkstalkers anyway? It's a 1v1 2D Fighting game featuring cartoony interpretations of B-movie horror monsters. The core cast includes Succubus Lady Everyone Recognizes, Vampire, Frankenstein, Werewolf, Feral Catgirl, Mummy, Sasquatch, Demon Samurai, Creature From The Black Lagoon, and Actually Just Johnny Rotten. There are also two non-playable bosses, Space Robot and Space Demon who are narratively here to destroy the world, as one does. Being a Capcom Fighting game, it uses a six-button layout and a lot of quarter-circles in the moveset. It plays and feels as you would expect if you've ever played any 90's Street Fighter.
I still haven't felt out who my main should be for this series. I thought it would be Jon Taliban but that has yet to work for me. My knifey jiangshi waifu doesn't show up until the second game, so I wound up randomly experimenting in this one. I eventually had the best luck with Rikuo, making it all the way to the final boss before the game slapped me down. Though, that's probably due to his easily exploitable heavy attacks more than anything else. I'm still unable to consistently pull off combos, though the ones here seem simple enough that it might be possible to learn them.
When fighting makes you eepy
Yet, the gameplay isn't the main draw here. As with all of the Darkstalkers games, this thing is a visual tour de force for its era. The animations are expressive and detailed, the backgrounds look good, and the music fulfills its role of reinforcing the fun and colorful mood. Taking a subject that is supposed to be grim or scary and turning it into some colorful and silly is a tried-and-true way of generating humor. Using that on already campy monster stereotypes would be difficult to pull off, and it speaks to the artistry of this team that the game pulls it off so well. Darkstalkers was and is fun to just look at and let wash over you, even if playing it isn't the best time.
That brings us back around to where this game fits and what may have contributed to the franchise's lack of staying power. From my admittedly incomplete background knowledge, this was Capcom's Next Big Thing after milking Street Fighter II for all it was worth. Capcom had spent the three years from early '91 to early '94 releasing version after version of SFII to arcades and they were running out of things to do with it. They seem to have worked on multiple concepts using the updated game engine from Super Street Fighter II Turbo, with Darkstalkers being the first. There was also a whole thing with Marvel, but we'll get to that in a few weeks. Carrying the fighting engine to a new IP allowed the developers to mess around with the systems, character archetypes, and balance. I'm physically incapable of getting into the weeds on the gameplay updates introduced here, but just know that Capcom's base Fighting game design was advancing with the Darkstalkers games.
This series would be quickly thrown to the wayside when Street Fighter Alpha got big and the memorable characters from this would eventually get absorbed into the Versus series, which is again a story for a different time. I think these games deserved better, personally. I'm probably last to the party on that opinion.
We've now reached our second arcade compilation. This time Namco has decided to get in on the fun with their first, and by no means last, collection. There's five of these things in total and we're going to see one every six months or so for the foreseeable future. Now, the issue with selling game compilations, or what would turn into HD remasters in this day and age, is in creating a package worth the full price of admission. We've previously seen Digital Eclipse tackle the issue with their Williams collection by including a wealth of documentary material about the development and design of the old arcade games featured in it. I find that extra info to be more interesting than the games themselves, but that's just me. Here, we see Namco trying, let's say, a different approach.
This first volume is anchored by three of Namco's most recognizable arcade games from the early 80's: Pac-Man, Pole Position, and Galaga. We also have Rally-X, Bosconian, and Toy Pop keeping those games company. I'm not an expert on early arcade games, and sadly this collection does little to enlighten me on that subject. What this does accomplish is surprisingly good emulation of those old arcade boards and presenting them in the least efficient way possible.
The museum environments don't need to be this extra
You might think the word 'museum' was added to the title as a cute way to sell a small collection of crusty old games. Yet, no one told the developers to not take that name literally because all of the content in this thing is presented in a polygonal 3D museum environment. You walk very slowly in first person through museum exhibits for each of these games and you play them by interacting with polygonal representations of their arcade cabinets. The package leans heavily into its visual metaphor. For example, when you start the disc you spawn in a reception lobby and you have to talk to a receptionist to register your save file. The problem is in the contents of the exhibits themselves, which consist of old marketing materials, scans of various stickers that would have adorned the cabinets, and basic tips or tricks. We don't learn the stories behind the games or why they matter, which is the issue with most arcade compilations. In that sense, this is a lazy package. We end up with a weird disconnect between the high level of effort put into the museum environment and the relatively low effort behind the materials that environment is meant to showcase.
Have fun with your nightmares
The games themselves are fine. Everyone should know what Pac-Man and Galaga are, and Pole Position was an influential early Scaler Racer. For the others, Rally-X is basically just a worse version of Pac-Man with cars, Bosconian is an interesting free-roaming space shooter that reuses sound effects from Galaga, and Toy Pop is a weird top-down Maze Shooter that feels kinda like a reaction to Bomberman. The famous games wouldn't have needed much introduction, but I don't feel any closer to understanding the importance, if any, of Toy Pop. Fortunately, five of the six games are good, I'll see Rally-X in hell, so there is a decent time to be found here. The most interesting aspect of the emulation is the way this thing handles the settings for each game. Bringing up the pause menu at the title screen of each game, which is coincidentally also the only way to quit out to the museum, will let you fiddle with virtual representations of the switches that would have been on the actual arcade board. I think this is a cool way to adjust the settings while also showing the player how the original machines would have worked.
There's a little bit of extra material regarding random topics around Namco in the early 80's, such as the semi-official Namco fan zine, NG. The first dozen or so covers of that magazine can be found in the museum lounge. I've firmly come down on the side of Digital Eclipse's method of repackaging old games, as FMV interviews add so much more to the experience than sterile museum levels. Though, I will recommend everyone reading this find a way to poke around with Bosconian, which is probably the most interesting early 80's arcade game you've never played; described by a random guy on the internet as "…too beautiful for this world." If you want to learn more about early Namco history or what else that random guy thinks about things, I recommend checking out the Namcompendium blog.
A specter is haunting the Playstation, and its name is Genki. The constant, unwavering frenemy of this blogging project has appeared once again. You know Genki, I mean, everyone knows Genki. They're the mid-tier SNES racing game developers who thought Iron Angel of the Apocalypse was cool and wanted to make their own. This studio was responsible for the early Saturn and PS1 games Robotica and Kileak: The DNA Imperative (pronounced "kill-eek") respectively. They also made Burning Soldier and Hang-On GP for some reason. Now, they're inflicting their third attempt at a mecha FPS with a direct sequel to Kileak. The original title for this thing was Kileak: The Blood: Reason in Madness, which I think slaps as a game title; but with almost no brand recognition in the west for Kileak and an inherent allergy to double subtitles in the English language, it ended up releasing here with the unfortunate name Epidemic.
Genki is inching closer to making a real video game
Being the third one of these, they've figured out how to design the controls, user interface, and environment around the constraints of the PS1's interface. That means the act of moving around and doing things is basically fine. Sadly, now that they've figured that part out, they went ahead and started adding gameplay mechanics on top of the standard Corridor Shooter formula. This includes slightly deeper weapon management, a mission-based structure, mech upgrading, and a kinda convoluted enemy alert system. For the large part, the new gameplay elements don't improve the experience. The mission structure means that there's no saving mid-level anymore, and there aren't any mid-mission checkpoints to compensate. There are three weapons you can switch between: a recharging laser, gun, and rockets, but the balance of damage-to-resource consumption feels off.
The most damning thing, though, is the encounter design. Instead of the barebones single-enemy-behind-every-door approach taken previously, we get a variety of patrolling enemies with limited detection ranges. The idea is that you need to deal with a unified security system, where patrolling bots, cameras, and turrets will act in unison, leading to a kind of rudimentary Active Stealth mechanic. This works poorly. The bots are infinitely spawning once an alert is activated, and the turrets do a lot of difficult to recover damage. The whole thing is poorly balanced when combined with the wonky aiming. This is like one-fifth of the way to being an early Immersive Sim, which is a genre you don't want to half-ass, much less one-fifth-ass. The various parts come together into something that isn't quite as unplayable as Defcon 5 but winds up somewhere in the neighborhood.
Plot
That's a shame, because Genki has doubled down on their tendency towards overwriting and under presenting their game stories. This game takes place 27 years after the events of Kileak. Remember the events of Kileak? Me neither. That game ended with the super-secret Antarctic mad science base getting blown up after you shoot the horrible biomonster a lot. Apparently, doing that released a world-ending plague on the world. The last bastion of humanity lives in an underground city controlled by a corporate police state. This time, you play as the son of the original voiceless protagonist, who wants to get to the surface to look for a cure for the world-ending disease keeping everyone underground. He goes through some twists, turns, and a eventually has a new biomonster to deal with. There's like half-a-dozen characters floating around the story, which is a lot for Genki. It's a given that every line read is bad and the CG cutscenes are worse. This is still endearing, though not as much as in the first game. Sadly, after all this time, Genki still hasn't been able to match the immaculately fucked vibes from Iron Angel of the Apocalypse.
The Atlanta Summer Olympics were held from July 19th to August 4th, 1996. All I'm publicly willing to admit to knowing about those games is that there was an infamous bomb scare and America is #1. For our purposes, this all means we get to deal with bad Olympics sports games coming out in the summer of '96. This is only the first of these we'll be seeing, which is the only ominous foreshadowing I'm giving you. Now, this isn't a licensed Olympics game but an installment in Konami's long-running Track & Field franchise. Yes, that Track & Field, the one you're thinking of. Apparently, after the first game, Konami realized they should put out sequels to coincide with the Summer Olympics. This isn't the last time we'll see this series, so we'll get into the details of its fate some other day.
In the years since the original NES release, they've been able to increase the number of events up to 11. In this iteration we have *inhale* 100m sprint, 100m hurdle, 100m freestyle swimming, long jump, triple jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin, shot put, discus, and hammer throw. That's some variety, but there are only like three types of gameplay between them. The running, swimming, and high jump events use a two button run one button jump setup, the other jumps and javelin use a two button power meter and one button angle meter setup, and the throwing events use a two button power meter and a timed directional throw button. There isn't even much variation between those three gameplay types. If you're wondering whether this thing encounters the same problem as the original, the answer is YES. I stopped playing after 20 minutes because my old man hands began cramping real bad.
I mean, it's solidly polygonal
Even if you practice and adhere to the most ergonomic possible method of playing this thing, commonly referred to as the Otter Technique, there isn't much to do. There's a practice mode and a for real mode, though that only matters for scoring. There's also jump-in multiplayer functionality for up to four players in some of the events, which is likely the main selling point. In singleplayer, when you play an event you record your time, win a medal or not, and get sent back to the event select menu. You could get a full experience with this thing in less than an hour. Considering that the gameplay hasn't advanced in the 13 years since the original game, there wouldn't have been much to recommend this thing. Four-player isn't even possible on the PS1 without an accessory, so I don't know what Konami was trying to accomplish here, besides the cheap cash-in of it all. This thing reviewed well at the time, so maybe I missed something. Regardless, my hand hurts and I think I took a good chunk of usable life out of my controller, so I wouldn't recommend this game in any time period.
This is your last chance to send in any questions you have before 9/6 either through DM on Giantbomb or the contact form on the wordpress site. I'll put those into a Q&A section at the end of Part 027 to celebrate reaching the 100th PS1 game.
Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
Time to Seeing A Doctor About This Rash: 45 Minutes
We've already looked at the later PS1 port of this game back in Part 014 of that series. My thoughts are mostly the same now as then, with the caveat that I've learned slightly more about early 90's Alt Rock. We've now come back around to the original release, and it's almost exactly the same game. The only noticeable difference is that this version runs WAY WORSE than the later port. I mean, this game chugs at 20 fps most of the time. The menuing also feels worse and the FMV seems more compressed. None of this should be surprising, since the 3DO is significantly less powerful than the Playstation and this thing was likely an ambitious use of Panasonic's hardware. Now, the poor performance might also be a consequence of emulation issues, but I'm not gonna drop hundreds of dollars on a physical set-up to find out. One last point on this topic, the slowdown ends up making the game slightly easier by extending the reaction time needed to avoid obstacles.
It's butt-ugly but it works
This puts me in an awkward situation. Road Rash is very mid by the standards of 1995 PS1 games, but by the standards of 1994 3DO games, it might be the best one I've seen so far. You might be wondering why I'm not comfortable coming to that conclusion. If so, I would like to point you back to the first paragraph where I state that this thing runs like trash. This is an obviously compromised experience, and yet out of all the 3DO games I've looked at so far, it's the most complete and enjoyable. This is probably appropriate considering the platform, but that doesn't mean I have to like this result.
I'm not sure how to approach this game. The original 1992 DOS release of Alone in the Dark was a seminal moment video game design. As reticent as I am to give French game developers any credit, the people at Infogrames introduced a lot of incredibly important design concepts for polygonal action/adventure games. This is basically where the idea of fixed camera angles with pre-rendered environments came from. It's also kinda the first Survival Horror game. I know it's reductive, but Resident Evil is just a better version of this game. Yet, because this is a trailblazing game, it's so much clunkier and awkward than the games which would come after it. For a modern player, that original DOS release is about two steps up from being unplayable. As with everything else in the 90's, the console version controls way worse than the PC version. That means this thing is only about a half-step up from unplayable.
Harder than it looks
That was a long-winded excuse for why I never made it past the first room in multiple attempts. This game moves so badly, like you don't even know. Though, if you have a handle on the controls and know what you're doing the whole thing can be completed in like an hour. The puzzles almost entirely consist of going to a place to get a thing and then using it at a different place. The combat is as janky as you could imagine from a pre-Resident Evil Survival Horror game, and the less said about the handful of platforming sections the better. I'm not sure what more to do with this thing besides stating its importance and moving on. That conclusion is of course reserved for the PC version, though I can't make any definitive statements about what, if any, impact the 3DO release would have had. Is this an important step in the evolution of d-pad controls for 3D games? I have no idea. Maybe Alone in the Dark QWOP-ed so that Resident Evil could tank control, or maybe not. Someone should look at this subject in greater depth. Also, the copy I played had an earsplitting audio bug that immediately wore down my patience, so maybe I would have had a better time without that.
Time to Being Legally Distinct From Mortal Kombat: 10 Minutes
In early 2023, HBO aired The Last of Us, which by the end of its first season showed potential as a franchise that could act as main billing for the channel, a spot which had recently been vacated by the decade-spanning blockbuster series Game of Thrones. This new show was of course based on the hit video game series of the same name, whose initial entry was released by Naughty Dog in 2013.
That development studio began life as a couple of teenagers, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, programming random nonsense for the Apple II computer in the mid 80's. The pair parlayed some initial success into developing games for Electronic Arts, which teens could do back then. With the help of future folding@home creator Vijay S. Pande and some wacky shenanigans, they eventually published a tactical RPG for the Genesis in 1991. That game, titled Rings of Power because nerds will be nerds, received mediocre reviews and moderate sales, but that's kind of an impressive accomplishment for 21-year-olds. As the story goes, Jason and Andy were prepared to split up and go their separate ways after that project, but Trip Hawkins himself sent them free 3DO dev kits in 1993 to find out what they could do with the technology. After more shenanigans and a potential misuse of MIT funding, the pair produced Way of the Warrior under the assumption that Fighting games were easy to make.
This is totally how fighting games are supposed to work
That backstory is necessary to appreciate what I'm about to say about this game. It's bad. Not quite unplayable, but still really bad. This is primarily due to the horribly clunky controls and slightly unusable combo system. The digitized sprites are also hilariously poor, but that isn't necessarily a big detriment. The only positive point I can make is that I dig the soundtrack, which was taken from the White Zombie album La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume 1. Your mileage may vary on whether that's a point for or against this game. Everything about the audio, visual, and 3doal design choices reflect the taste and judgement of unsupervised Gen X white guys in their early 20's. I'm not even going to go down the list characters or locations, because you can probably get a close enough idea just from the phrase, "it's a Mortal Kombat knock-off". Like all cheap imitations, which is a factual statement here and not an insult, it doesn't live up to the level of its inspiration. Though, Way of the Warrior is on the 3DO and Mortal Kombat isn't, so nature abhors a vacuum or something like that.
Most reviews from the time seem to have agreed with my sentiments towards the game. It's only notable because it existed when and where it did. That said, without this game Naughty Dog would have ceased to exist. Thus, following Domino Theory, if you're already tired of hearing about The Last of Us from your non-gaming acquaintances, you can place the blame ultimately on Trip Hawkins for being so generous with dev kits.
Staying on the Electronic Arts trend we've had going this week, let's look at the original release of The Need for Speed. I talked a bit about the rerelease of this thing on the PS1 back in Part 021 of that series. I was really down on that game because I was mentally comparing it to stuff like Ridge Racer and Sega Rally Championship, which are much better experiences. The thing is, within the context of the 3DO where its main competition is stuff like Crash & Burn or MegaRace this game suddenly becomes completely fine and acceptable. Though, that's misleading, as the 3DO release of The Need for Speed is a very different game than what would later be ported to other consoles.
The game still has the Road & Track partnership and car porn that we all know and love from the more well-known versions, but the racing part of this Racing game is almost completely different. There are only three courses here, all of which are point-to-point races consisting of up to three sections. You only race one other car, and there is no kind of tournament or grand prix mode on offer. You race your one opponent on very mundane roadways for like ten minutes, receive a score that goes on a leaderboard and get spat out to the main menu. You could experience every piece of content in this game in less than an hour.
These car interiors have more going on than anything else in the game
The experience of driving the cars isn't awesome either. The cars and environments are butt-ugly and there is a complete lack of music during the races. The one positive thing I can say is that the driving model feels more advanced than anything that you likely could have found on the SNES or Genesis. From what I could glean, a lot of the development effort was put into creating that realistic driving model and the developers were largely successful in doing so. It's just that there isn't much of anything to do with the cutting-edge car physics, and you can imagine how poorly the driving model has aged in the intervening decades. There isn't anything that would recommend this game other than the fact that it basically works. Though by the standards of the 3DO, being basically playable is a high achievement.
Oh, and there's an FMV guy who says random crap to you at different moments throughout the game, I highly suggest watching all the clips below.
Time to Having More Questions Than Answers: 42 Minutes
I've gone back and forth several times on what I should do about this particular piece of media. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties frequently appears on "Worst Games of All Time" lists and was the subject of a famous early Angry Video Game Nerd episode. I'm not sure how to feel about that, not because of any affection for this piece of crap, but because I hesitate to even classify it as a video game. Let's start at the top and see where we go from there.
This…thing is supposed to be an Interactive Movie in the style of a Choose Your Own Adventure story. That story follows two schmucks named John and Jane, who we are introduced to us as they wake up and go about their morning routines. Each of them also receives phone calls where their parents harass them about finding someone to marry, I'm guessing because they're single and closing in on 30. Later, the two have what is supposed to be a meet-cute in the parking lot of some office building, he's a plumber or something and she's going in for a job interview. This is supposedly one of those love-at-first-sight kind of situations. Jane goes to her interview, where the old guy hiring manager almost immediately demands sexual favors in exchange for the job. Jane refuses but also gets half-naked for whatever reason. The old guy then tries to sexually assault her, and she runs for it with him giving chase. They run out to the parking lot where John is still hanging around for some reason, and he chases the pair in an attempt to rescue Jane. The trio run around various Los Angeles landmarks before ending up In a random construction site. As John is about to beat the crap out of the old guy, Jane tells him to stop, at which point she begins to negotiate some kind of sex-for-money deal with the old guy for some reason. At hearing this, John pleads with her to stop and confesses his love. Also, an older woman walks in and volunteers to have sex with the old guy for unclear reasons. After all that is settled, John and Jane ride off on his motorcycle.
Graphic design is my passion
That's the full plot explanation for the critical path. If that seemed like problematic nonsense, just know that I left out a lot of irrelevant details. For example, there is an unhelpful narrator that chimes in periodically who gets upstaged by a second narrator for a short time, who is then shot to death by the first narrator as he regains control of the narration. Then you have the whole tie joke which serves as the central gag for no apparent reason. At the beginning of the story John's mom tells him to wear a tie to work, even though he's a plumber. Jane comments on his weird outfit when they meet, and during the ending the last bit of dialogue has Jane not believing John when he says what he does for a living because, "plumbers don't wear ties." The punchline is the title. It's humor.
That's the thing, this game is supposed to be a romantic comedy. We're supposed to laugh at the grossly invasive parenting and sexual violence. Everything here is supposed to be a gag of some kind or another, and none of it lands. That's partly due to the writer not having understood how comedy works, and partly due to using the least effective storytelling technique possible. I might have buried the lede by only mentioning it now, but this isn't an FMV game. The only video is at the beginning where the lead actress unnecessarily explains the game to the player, the entire rest of the experience is a slideshow of static pictures with voiceover from the actors. Additionally, you only interact with the experience in seven decision points throughout the story where one choice continues the game and the rest lead to joke endings, after which the narrator berates you and gives you an opportunity to go back to the last decision point. This is the most hurky-jerky and low rent way to tell a story you could possibly do using an interactive format.
Gameplay (citation needed)
I don't want to call this thing a game, or an interactive movie, or slot it into any category of creative media. If anything, it's a shitpost that was sold in stores at full price. If this was a prank or a scam, then it would be glorious. I've seen retrospectives attempt to find some meaning in this thing, calling it either avant garde or dada-ist, but I don't think it deserves that kind of credit. This was likely meant to be an interactive comedy with softcore erotic elements, and it just failed miserably at that goal. I think what people get caught up on is how something could be this much of a creative and technical failure and still see make its way to store shelves. Shouldn't someone have stopped it at some point in the publishing process? Contemporary reviewers used this product as a way to criticize the 3DO's absence of content controls, so it was likely seen as nothing more than cheap, low-effort multimedia shovelware. Considering the landscape of early 90's gaming and the avalanche of multimedia nonsense, that would have been a fair judgement. I think this thing has maintained its own dark corner of popular culture while many, many other terrible multimedia products have faded because of the complete extent of its wrong-headedness. No one is supposed to publish something this terrible onto a game console, it doesn't happen. That unique quality is what causes me to become laden with so many questions.
I won't call this out for not making sense, because that's what they want me to do
Why did they rely on still images? Why have a narrator? Why use sexual assault as the joke? Why add interactivity if there's so little of it? What the hell is up with the title screen? Did the production staff think this was a good idea? Why the wacky hats? Why have that nudity joke? Why keep one FMV at the beginning if the rest is a slideshow? Are the decision screens so janky because they were a late addition? Why put it out at all if it turned out so bad? What was this thing originally supposed to be? Why have the tie to begin with? I have so many more questions. The kicker is that there is currently next to zero background information about this game out there on the internet. Kirin Entertainment would produce another couple of games for the 3DO and disappear. The writer/director/producer of this thing kind of dropped off the face of the earth, and most of the actors involved did nothing or next to nothing afterwards. The most prominent member of the cast is the actress who played Jane, Jeanne Basone, who had previously been one of the original GLOW cast members. The only reason there's anything out there about this thing is because she is occasionally asked about it in interviews.
That means all I can do right now is dissect the game frame by frame and line by line to attempt to extrapolate answers to my questions. That might be interesting as artistic criticism, but it won't get me answers. I've seen Plumbers Don't Wear Ties compared to Tommy Wiseau's The Room. While I don't agree with that comparison, The Room at least has seen extensive documentation and investigation into its creation, and even an Oscar nominated movie about that process. I wouldn't feel comfortable tackling this thing without any useful background info, which is why I eventually decided to not devote several thousand words and a dedicated post to this topic. That said, Limited Run Games is supposed to release a remaster of this thing in the coming weeks, and it looks like that package will include interviews and other materials that could shed some light into this dark corner of gaming history. If there's a satisfactory amount of stuff in that release, I will likely revisit this topic.
Regardless of future plans, this is the worst experience I've had with anything in the past year of writing these blogs. I felt physically and mentally dirty after going through this thing and I wanted to shower afterwards, but I'm sullied in ways that can never be cleaned. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties has set a near-unattainable low bar against which to compare other bad games. If you have a sickness and want to watch me drag ArbitraryWater, ZombiePie, and friends through this experience, check out the video below. Also, the stream was as much a disaster as the game, so have fun with that.
I want to say that the last game this week is as bad as the 3DO catalog gets, but that would be giving myself false hope. I'm going to update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and then drink this whole fiasco away.
As a reminder, send in any questions you have before 9/6 either through DM on Giantbomb or the contact form on the wordpress site. I'll put those into a Q&A section at the end of Part 027 to celebrate reaching the 100th PS1 game.
Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
In 1986, Tom Cruise became the coolestest and bestestest F-14 pilot in the whole entire world. This was chronicled in the documentary film Top Gun, which was a phenomenal box office hit and crowd pleaser, likely due to its unrelenting homoerotic overtones. Some people misinterpreted the point of the movie as being about how US Navy fighter jets are rad and important, which was actually a secondary theme. That misinterpretation was widespread enough that all of the tie-in media for Top Gun focused on the F-14. As such, the various video games released over the following decade were Flight Combat games of either the arcade or simulator persuasion. None of them had much in terms of plot, until now. I'm probably getting ahead of myself, let's start over from the top.
Top Gun: Fire At Will! doesn't involve shooting guys named William (I couldn't help myself), but instead is a polygonal Flight Combat game that takes some, uh, inspiration from Air Combat. Now, if you're gonna knock off anything, it might as well be the official unofficial best PS1 game to-date, so I can't hold that against Microprose. They at least changed things up a bit by replacing the world map and plane management with a linear cutscene-driven story, which is a valid enough thing to do. Sadly, they didn't copy the parts of Air Combat's design and programming that makes it good. The well thought out combat encounters are replaced by haphazard swarms of enemy planes, even though this game will measure distances in thousands of feet the scale of the environment and planes don't make sense, the flying is less precise, the missiles are almost useless, and it somehow looks slightly worse than that year-old launch title.
There isn't much subtlety to the encounter design
Even with its lack of care and attention, this game is still entirely playable. It seems like there are somewhere around 20-or-so levels and it would likely take somewhere around three hours to get through, which is a pretty good amount of content for the era. There are a few minor gameplay and graphical additions here that do something to differentiate this experience from its superior inspiration. There's a flare mechanic where you can shoot off chafe when targeted by an enemy missile, which helps to compensate for the incredible amount of metal which gets tossed around by the AI. There are also cloud textures that you can fly through, which I suppose adds a little flair to the levels. I also noticed an odd thing with the music, which is that the first set of levels use generic Top Gun sounding background music, but the second set of levels use tracks that would sound appropriate coming out of an early Shin Megami Tensei game. It's tonally weird, but nice enough to listen to while mindlessly flying around. Take a listen.
Yet, the gameplay and technical points aren't what makes this a memorable experience. The presence and nature of the story are what's going to stay with me. So, the first thing you see when you start the disc is an extended opening cutscene that uses 100% of the B-roll from the opening credits of the movie, except the credits themselves are changed to show the game staff. It's literally the same footage, just compressed all to hell. If you remember, this is the part of the movie with“Danger Zone”. That song is used here, but I guess Spectrum Holobyte couldn't afford Kenny Loggins, so it's a cover of“Danger Zone” that plays through the cutscene. That's already a surreal experience, but it then transitions into a cutscene that cheaply remakes the opening scene of the movie, where Maverick coaxes his shook wingman into a successful carrier landing, just without any of the close-ups or dialogue. This time, it's a different wingman who has to be coaxed into a landing by a different Maverick. That's right, you play as Maverick, but not the Tom Cruise character.
The game isn't upfront about it, but it seems like this is a narrative sequel to the movie. You play as some younger relative of Pete Mitchell's who took on his callsign for some reason. From the scenes I saw, it's ambiguous as to what the relationship there is supposed to be. Is your character Tom Cruise's Son? Nephew? Second cousin? I have no idea. The story seems to take place in the 90's, so that would rule out being the son, unless Maverick had a secret teenage kid running around during the events of the movie. The only returning character is the carrier captain played by James Tolkan, who was renamed for some reason. The story continues with New Maverick and his co-pilot attending Miramar with a new, much less interesting, cast of fellow fighter jocks. So far, this is a 1:1 recreation of the opening of the movie, just with 5% of the personality or storytelling skill.
You need to shoot down 80 drones to get this cheap-looking plaque
This thing really goes off the rails when you graduate from Top Gun after like six missions. The rest of the game has you and the other characters flying missions in military hotspots all over the world with the first location being Cuba. I kid you not, the plot goes from piloting school to Castro invading Guantanamo Bay for no apparent reason. Eradicating the Cuban military normally wouldn't be a strain on U.S. military resources, but in this timeline, Castro somehow got his hands on hundreds of MiGs. This is all very silly and hilariously presented. It seems that every country New Maverick bombs takes up a multi-mission story arc, with North Korea and Libya following Cuba. There seems to be an overarching plot about some elite mercenary pilots who are probably the ones stirring everything up. That's…more plot that I would have expected going in. The surreal nature of this story is exacerbated by the fact that all of the FMV sets are greenscreened in. The thing is, those sets are mostly different kinds of offices or other bland rooms, which are relatively easy to set up practically. It doesn't help that the fidelity of the CGI is very mid 90's and the compositing isn't great.
Everything going on around the edges of the gameplay is just bizarre. I have no idea what to make of it, and I'm probably going to go back and finish this game just to see if anything particularly weird happens. FMV character drama can be used to give something to latch onto for Flight Combat games, with the Wing Commander series being the prime example (yes, I know that Space Combat is technically a different sub-genre, shut up). Of course, FMV only enhances the experience when the game itself is good. I can pick a dozen examples from this same era where FMV either did nothing for or actively worked against an otherwise mediocre game, *cough*Crystal Dynamics*cough*. Top Gun: Fire At Will! Was already probably the third-best Flight Combat game I've played so far, behind Air Combat and Wing Arms, but the weird plot will stay in my mind long after something like Wing Arms has been memory-holed.
Now for something far less exciting than unrestricted air war, Tennis. This is somehow only the second Tennis game we've encountered across this entire project, with the first being the PS1 launch game Power Serve 3D Tennis which I very much do not recommend playing. On one hand I shouldn't be surprised, because who's out there making Tennis games these days, that genre is basically gone. Yet, Tennis was one of the original NES games and there were a handful of Tennis games on each console up until 2006 or somewhere around then. Looking at it that way, this is likely the appropriate moment for a playable Tennis game to make its way onto the PS1.
Did you catch my wording in that last sentence? That's right, V-Tennis is entirely playable. It's fine. You can hit the ball back and forth in ways that largely make sense. Isn't that what anyone wants from these things? There are something like 16 players to choose between, a handful of courts and the standard ground types. That all seems normal, but the game doesn't hide its lack of gameplay modes, with only a one/two player single match and one-player tournament ladder as the only options. It's a barebones experience, but fortunately the game part of this game basically works. You play using the time-tested controls of a d-pad and one button, and the hitbox on the racket is extremely generous, so you don't get the kind of bullshit like in Power Serve where it can look like the ball passes through your swing.
Look, character models are hard
Additionally, this thing has robust camera options, which prevents the worst excesses that a 3D Tennis game could potentially wallow in. Everything adds up to an entirely adequate time, and I could see myself becoming decent at the game after an hour or two. There isn't much else to talk about, other than the generic music and bad crowd texture. The development studio, Tonkin House, also didn't make much of an impression in its decade long existence, mainly producing mid-tier SNES sports games. Maybe you could classify this as cheap shovelware, but at this point in the console cycle it still ends up as the best available Tennis game. This now makes two cryptid Japanese sports games in just as many installments. If you know Japanese, you could probably find something worth writing about by investigating the sports game development sub-industry in Japan from the 80's to 90's and why it dies out.
Between this and the Saturn release of SimCity 2000, I think we've found my weak spot. Management Sim games generally aren't my kind of thing, and the crustier those games are the less I'm able to deal with them. Case in point, I noped straight out of A-Train in less than 10 minutes because I literally had no idea where to even begin with anything. This game throws the player in with no explanations, tips, hints, tutorial, or anything to make it make sense. There's a map, several screens where you can manage train services that I wasn't able to see on the map, and some basic construction options. I don't usually do this, but I'm going to show y'all my notes that I took starting from first game boot to the five-minute mark, they should clue you in on everything you need to know about the experience:
Choo choo
Mario sunshine ass music
Literally no tutorial in this thing. I need an adult.
I can't. What the fuck is even going on.
There are a couple of bullets after that, but they get a bit more vulgar and libelous. This thing absolutely defeated me. I would need the game manual, a walkthrough, and like an hour in order to even begin to figure this thing out and I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that I ain't doing that.
*Blank stare*
I encountered just as much confusion trying to research the A-Train franchise. From what I gathered, this game is a modified version of the Japanese PS1 port of A-Train IV, which was one of the system's 1994 launch titles. The original A-Train IV was a '93 release for the PC-98, and now that I type that I can totally see the PC-98 stank in the graphical interface of this thing. This series has apparently been going since the first A-Train came out on the PC-88 in 1985, with the latest release in 2021. This is a very old and successful franchise in Japan, but it has rarely made its way to the rest of the world. Artdink partnered with Maxis to bring various versions of A-Train II, III, and IV to the U.S. under a variety of names, none of which saw much success. The whole thing receded back to Japan until only the last few years, with the latest handful of entries seeing international releases on Steam. I honestly don't know what to make of all this, other than that the developers seem to be under the impression that I should already know what I'm doing before starting the game.
I've done some math out of my own curiosity, so bear with me for a few sentences. Between the PS1 and the Saturn, this is the 163rd game that I've reviewed. Of the previous 162, five were Baseball games. As of right now, the average BORQ score for the three games on the PS1 is 1.67, which is out of five if you remember. The two games on the Saturn aren't much better, averaging a 2.00. You might conclude that I have some kind of America-hating bias against baseball, but I would say that the reason for those scores is that the games so far have been kinda terrible. I bring this up to give you some context when I say that Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball is the best Baseball game I have yet seen on a 32-bit console. The context being that it's an extremely low bar to clear.
Let's go through this game topic by topic to justify my backhanded praise. First, the game modes are adequately robust with season, single match, home run derby, and practice modes. The options and menu design make sense and are easy enough to navigate. The sound design is completely decent, with above average stadium noise and inoffensively stitched together announcer lines. The graphics are fine, with nice big sprites that may or may not be digitized FMV guys. The animations are also pretty good for this type of game. The main graphical issue is that the stadiums are generally ugly with weird scaling between the crowd texture, players, and ball.
This looks fine enough
Then there's the gameplay. This thing eschews some of the more egregious design choices that we've seen in other games. Outfielding is automatically handled by the AI, which avoids the incoherent fuckery that is common in this genre, and the game doesn't try to do anything fancy with the batting or pitching. Batting is handled with a straightforward timed button press and the pitching options are displayed at all times during those sections. I wasn't able to figure out how to run a double, but that's on par with my past experiences and is probably on me. The one quirk I had trouble with was in trying to figure out the nuance with batting. I kept hitting either ground balls or fly balls, and it seems there's something to do with the specific frame timing or batter position that causes that to happen. I could have likely figured it out given enough time, so I'm not going to judge the experience too harshly for that. Overall, this is as fine an experience as you could get with a 32-bit Baseball game of the time.
Maybe one of my favorite loading screens of all time
That conclusion feels really weird to write considering where this came from. It should be obvious to everyone who was around in the 90's or who has been reading this, that Acclaim were notorious shitmongers. When you look at the output of their in-house development studios, Iguana and Probe, you end up looking at a list of bad licensed games and second-tier sports titles. Particularly, Iguana were the ones who ported NBA Jam to consoles and cobbled together developed that College Slam game I dunked on a while back (pun intended). I wouldn't have expected much from this studio, much less the first good Baseball game on the Playstation. I guess this went well enough that they transitioned the sequels away from the Frank Thomas license and into their own All-Star Baseball franchise, which was vital in keeping Acclaim in business right up to the point it went bankrupt in 2005.
Speaking of Frank Thomas, I had no idea who he was until I looked him up for this review. It shouldn't be surprising that he was one of the most successful batters of the 90's, or I guess of all time. baseball stats are hard to parse. More interestingly, he was a major figure in the anti-doping debate within the MLB during the late 90's and early 00's. It's always nice to be able to feel ok about the namesake of decent sports games. I found it particularly funny that he was a public foil for Barry Bonds, whose name is now synonymous with doping, because the first match I played in this game had Bonds on the opposing team and that mfer hit a home run in like his second at-bat. I guess even digital athletes can abuse steroids.
As a reminder, send in any questions you have before 9/6 either through DM on Giantbomb or the contact form on the wordpress site. I'll put those into a Q&A section at the end of Part 027 to celebrate reaching the 100th PS1 game.
Also, I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and continuing my hare-brained scheme to play every PS1 RPG to completion.
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