When looking into the history of the 3DO, I encountered a reference to The 3DO Company's CEO Trip Hawkins' thoughts on the new Atari console before its launch in 1993. He was initially worried about Atari providing competition for the 3DO and muddying the launch of his own console, or at least causing market confusion and hurting sales. That is, until the public unveiling the new Atari console, called the Jaguar, at the Chicago CES in August '93. After seeing it for himself, Hawkins ceased to have any concerns, he regarded the Jaguar as being beneath consideration. Time would prove that Trip Hawkins was correct in his assessment.
After the too-little-too-late failure of the 8-bit Atari 7800, the company decided to give the console market one more go. This ultimately resulted in the creation of a console with two 32-bit processors that were each nominally eight times faster than the SNES CPU, two whole entire megabytes of RAM which was again eight times more than the SNES, and supposedly CD quality audio. Though, the system used cartridges that were similar in size to contemporary 16-bit consoles. That flaw will become important. This whole package was priced at $249 for launch in late '93 and early '94. This was significantly cheaper than the 3DO, which was an eye-popping $700, but almost twice as much as the Genesis, which was only $129, and the SNES, which was $149.
The box, the myth, the hand cramps
There's also the issue of Atari's claim that the Jaguar was a 64-bit console, which was highly dubious and based solely on the presence of a 64-bit bus connecting the two 32-bit processors. I'm not an engineer, but that's probably not how bit classification is supposed to work. This controversy is indicative of the myriad problems with the Jaguar. From the number pad on the controller, to the non-existent third-party support, to making the completely wrong call on the future of video game formats, the story of the Jaguar is one of poor judgement and abject failure. This would be Atari's final home console and would be such an afterthought that all of its patents would get released after the Atari brand was sold off for scrap in 1998.
There is a whole book's worth of stuff to talk about regarding Atari in the 90's, but there's plenty of time for that. For now, we're concerned with the games that came out for the Jaguar, and their place in the context of the early 32-bit era of console games.
My look at the 3DO game library in All 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order would not be complete without also evaluating the alternative system, even if Trip Hawkins didn't consider it a competitor. As such, we're going to look at the Jaguar catalog as intermissions from the main 3DO series. I say 'intermission' because there isn't a ton to look at with this thing. When counting the Jaguar CD, there were a total of 62 games released for the system between November 23, 1993 and May 15, 1998. That is a fraction of the 3DO library, which is already small by console standards. With all of that in mind, let’s establish the ground rules for this thing.
I plan to publish entries in this series as breaks in the 3DO series, like how I'm handling the Playstation and Saturn.
I'm planning to include either 4 or 5 games per entry, which should come out to around the size of my 3DO posts most of the time.
As always, I will play the games until I get pissed off or bored, which should mean that total playtimes probably aren't going to average that high.
The emulation software for the Jaguar has recently become virtually flawless, but it works a bit differently than the software I've been using so who knows what's going to happen. Regardless, everyone should go support the creator of the BigPemu emulator, Rich Whitehouse, who is doing fantastic work.
I actually have hard and fast release dates for all of these games, which will create some awkwardness in lining up this series with the 3DO series. We'll see what I can do with that.
Finally, I'm going to stream my initial experiences with these games over on my twitch channel, which will put an asterisks on my play times for every single one of them.
We start the year off with a first party game that had already come out in other regions the previous Fall. I'm not sure what delayed the release of this version, but it's a welcome sight during the January morass. Wing Arms is a Flight Combat game that takes some, let's say creative, liberties with its late-WWII setting. While Sega arcade games of this period have the same kind of three mission structure, their console action games seem to be developing their own six mission structure. Though unlike Panzer Dragoon, this game lets you see the ending on default settings.
I'm not overly fond of the premise, so let's get that out of the way first. The year is 1945 and some international super-villain conglomerate has cobbled a military together to fight the recently exhausted major powers for world domination for some reason. These villains pull off a Pearl Harbor 2: Electric Boogaloo, leaving only one allied aircraft carrier left in fighting condition. That carrier is somehow operating planes from every major air power of WWII, including US Navy Hellcats, US Army Mustangs, British Spitfires, Japanese Zeros, and German Messerschmitts among others. While this gives plenty of gameplay variety, maybe they shouldn't have cobbled together a plot justification for axis and allies to buddy up. Anyway, using your chosen plane you go through six levels of dogfights, base attacks, and ship attacks.
Bet you didn't have Pearl Harbor nostalgia on your Saturn bingo card
Being a WWII-era Flight Combat game, your only weapons are your guns that can overheat and a limited, non-refillable supply of dumb rockets. You have a simple radar, useful map, altimeter, and level completion counter as UI elements in all views, with the speedometer and reticule reserved for the cockpit view for some reason. I played most of the game from the third-person perspective until I realized the cockpit had more information. Being a first party Sega game, the thing looks good, sounds good, and controls well. The game gives you a flight ceiling of about 1000 feet, which is enough for the purposes of the gameplay. The difficulty ramp is also highly reasonable, and I was able to beat the thing with only a couple of bumps. Fundamentally, this is one of the best games so far for the Saturn, which is why I will commence the nitpicking.
F6F is best girl...I already regret writing that
This thing is good enough to have Air Combat serve as the main point of comparison, to its misfortune. The immediate point of comparison is the draw distance. While Namco's game was awesome with its polygonal sightlines, Wing Arms fares worse. Objects only pop into existence when they're less than a hundred meters or so away, which is a bit too short for navigating interceptions or attack runs. Also, there isn't as much gameplay variety as you would want from a game with only six missions. The first mission is all dogfighting, which is fair enough. The second mission is to kill a weird oil rig shaped base and a Shokaku lookin' motherfucker. Next is a canyon maze where you have to chase down half-a-dozen planes, this is the worst section, and a desert level where you have to kill two bases identical to the first one. The fourth mission is more dogfighting and killing some destroyers and a cruiser. Next is a worse version of the Air Combat final boss in a night level, this is the second worst section. Finally, you kill one more base and the superbattleship Yamato the bad guys' scary super-duper weapon. The game switches between air/ground combat frequently enough, but with only one loadout, there's only so much variation in what you can do. You could probably say that about any Flight Combat game, but it does feel like something is seriously missing from this experience.
It's really hard to screw up the thrill of diving through a cloud of AA
There's not a ton else going on here. You have a kind of scoring system, but being a single-player console game, it could not matter less. There's some unpacking that you can do around the premise. A Japanese studio making a game where the axis and allies of WWII team up to fight a rogue military that possesses Japanese naval assets and a literal airship, which is basically an AC-130 with a death ray and can launch infinite rocket interceptors. I don't have the time or ability to fully address the thinking behind these creative choices, but I can raise an eyebrow and point them out. Otherwise, this is the second-best flying game I've played so far for these consoles, which is a position that has a lot of distance to both first in front and third behind.
We now have the first real Football game for the Saturn. I'm not counting Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka because doing so would require grappling with that thing’s existence, which I'm too sober to attempt. Though I'm mildly reluctant to give this game too much credit, being an up-ported 16-bit game. Also, I am under no obligation to respect Acclaim's in-house sports franchises, which we will have more than ample opportunity to talk about in the future.
At least the sprites are intelligible
So, what does this cross-gen also-ran Football game have to offer? All of the standard features and expected gameplay that can be seen in other end of life SNES sports games. It also exists on a platform that Madden has failed to reach, so it's your best option by default. You have single game, season, and multi-player modes to work with. In the matches themselves, you choose plays and try to throw the ball around. Like with my short time playing NFL Gameday, I'm completely lost in all aspects of the gameplay. Though, I think I'm getting better, since I was able to figure out how to pass the ball and I even completed one whole entire pass in the three quarters I played. If I had more than 1.5 seconds to throw the ball before getting sacked, I could probably get a better hang of the gameplay. Yet, such as it is, this is definitely Football.
Proud to say that I still have no idea what I'm doing
There are probably all kinds of things that can be dug into with the gameplay of the Quarterback Club series versus its competitors, the new features here compared to the previous year, and even what the generational transition meant for this genre. I am wholly unequipped to do any of that. As far as I can say, this is much less polygonal than NFL Gameday, but it seems to be more feature rich, and I was able to figure out how to play it slightly better. So, I guess this is the best Football game so far for either the Saturn or Playstation. Yay?
Time to Fine, I Didn't Want To Play This Stupid Game Anyway: 8 Minutes
While we're dealing with Acclaim, we might as well get this out of the way. Before talking about the game itself, I want to revel in the hilarity of this ports existence. Even though this game was less than 2.5 years old at this point, UMK3 has been out in arcades for a couple of months and vanilla MK3 has been on the PS1 since the previous October. While there are plenty of people these days who would go to bat for MKII over MK3, this was still a massive show of weakness for Sega in '96. This game had already been ported to the SNES, Game Boy, 32X, PCs, and the Master System by this point. The Saturn version was apparently the closest to being arcade accurate of all of these, but would that have mattered this late in the scheme of things?
Not shown: my violent death ten seconds later
So, how is the game itself? It's literally Mortal Kombat II with CD loading times. This is almost impossible for me to review for two interconnected reasons. First, this is intended as a two-player game more so than just about any other fighting game we've seen thus far, and playing it alone is literally doing it wrong. Second, because I didn't spend the mid-90's gitting gud at Mortal Kombat with my local arcade delinquents, the brutal AI of the fight ladder presented an immediate and overwhelming difficulty wall. How many times can I get instantly eviscerated by the first fight in a ladder before I go do literally anything else with my time? At least in the PS1 release of MK3 I was able to get to the second fight. There's literally nothing in here but the fight ladder and two-player, so there's nothing for me to do. Also, if someone cared enough to be good at these games, they had probably already moved on to the next one by this point. There's basically nothing to recommend this thing either at the time or in retrospect.
Arc Developments will haunt me to my dying days. How does the (at time of writing) worst PS1 game fare on the Saturn? Exactly the same! If anything, Arc has accomplished the task of creating the exact same experience on both consoles. This is probably because this wretched thing was originally a 3DO game and was thus non-taxing to both systems. Still, I wish there was something different going on here.
To reiterate, this is a single course golf game full of Hyatt branding that was originally a 3DO game from 1994. Other than being a piss poor representation of the Dorado Beach golf course, it's also a disastrously bad Golf game. Since this is my second experience with the thing, I've developed a more focused opinion on where this all goes horribly wrong. I'm not going to harp that much on the presentation, because it looks passable by 3DO standards, which was the original context for the game. Instead, let's zero in on the act of moving the ball around.
If you think you know how Golf is supposed to work, then you know more than this game
I described the horrific shot mechanics in my previous review, but let's dive in a bit more. The simple fact that you have to move a cursor around on the screen from a behind the back view is a hideous design choice. Humor me for a bit. When you look at a 2D picture of a piece of landscape that extends off for some distance, any arbitrary pixel in that photo is going to represent a spot in 3D space that is a different distance and elevation from the viewpoint and any other pixel. The greater the distance being imaged, and the fewer number of pixels used to do so, the greater the area represented by each pixel. Because of the nature of image depth, the area represented in each pixel is going to increase the further away it is from the viewpoint. The native resolution of the original release of his game was probably somewhere around 240x320, with only a third to half of the screen representing the terrain in front of you. Using those pixels to aim down a golf course up to 300 or so yards away is unfeasible. There is no way to make that aiming system work, and the only thing more inexplicable than the devs attempting it was the publisher greenlighting the final product. Your brain has to be really Amiga-poisoned to do that kind of thing.
I'll save the rest of this rant for when I inevitably have to play this thing again for the 3DO series. I'm going to make a badly considered promise. When that time comes, I'll stream myself failing miserably at all 18 holes.
Another week, another 'shmup. This time we have the honor of getting smacked around by Taito's flagship Shooter franchise, Darius. The original Darius, released to arcades in 1987, was the result of developers at Taito looking at Gradius and saying, "but what if it was w I d e r". The damn thing used a three-screen arcade cabinet, which created a big 'ol pain in the rear for everyone who had to either port, emulate, or do cabinet upkeep on the thing. It also did one up on the other big 'shmups of the time by having branching paths after every level, which meant you could only see 7 of the 28 stages in a single run, though all the stages in the same tier tend to share enemies. 1989's Darius II would keep the unique game structure but scale down to a two-screen display, making it slightly less of a pain in the rear. After this Taito realized that console games made money and they proceeded to put some graphically reasonable entries on home systems for a while.
That is until round about 1994, when one of the younger designers at the company got the idea that Darius III would be good to showcase the power of Taito's new arcade board. The biggest innovation here, other than polygons and high-quality audio, was putting it on one screen like a normal goddamn video game. The design and artistry going into the production were all completely sound, though the name would be changed to Darius Gaiden for lore reasons. A year and a half after its release in arcades, we now have to deal with it on the Saturn.
The only thing worth warning about, if you ask me
The premise involves some space stuff about people moving planets because of aliens flying around in giant angler fish or something. No matter how many times I look at the lore of the Darius series, it never sticks. Though I do remember that this takes place between the first two games, which is why it's Gaiden and not III. Regardless, you fly a ship horizontally through seven stages, with branching paths at the end of the first six. This is still a neat way to structure a 'shmup, even in our more advanced era. The environment and sprites themselves look good in a way that makes me think of well-produced GBA games, which is also a vibe I got off of Astal. I also dig the music, which I have a hard time describing, but it works well when combined with the sound effects and overall visual flow. Take a listen to it below and come to your own conclusions.
So, the structure is neat, and the presentation is top notch for its era, but video games have to be played. As you would probably expect, this game is hella fucked. There are two main reasons for this. Well, there are three, but 'shmups being inherently fucked hard is a given so I'm not counting it. The first thing is that you only get three continues to last for an entire playthrough. I've gone off repeatedly about strict continue limits, and I will never stop. That issue is compounded by this thing being a proto-Bullet Hell game. It doesn't go full Ikaruga, but it also ain't Gradius either, if you know what I mean. So, you're dodging a bunch of bullshit and you don't get to make that many mistakes. That's a long way of saying that I didn't get past the third tier of stages. There aren't any other modes going on, so it's either bang your head against this thing and memorize a path or go do something else.
This looks like a GBA game, right?
Like with Taito's previous Saturn Shooter, Galactic Attack, the presentation is good but playing it is a chore. Between these two games and In the Hunt, I'm starting to have that as my default opinion for the entire genre. This thing reviewed well in its time and was successful enough for what it was, but the market for 'shmups was starting to dry up and the genre was trending towards the insularity of Bullet Hells. This game is either one of the last hurrahs of old Shooter design, or the beginning of the end. I'm not an expert of the genre, so I'll just continue to suck at these while complaining about continues.
Finally, we have to deal with this. What would Hang-On be without the motorcycle cabinet or Yu Suzuki? Not much, apparently. Hang-On GP is the third and final game in the otherwise vaunted series and the first to not be directly developed by Sega. I've just now realized while looking into this developer, Genki, that they made both Kileak and Robotica, and I have no idea how I missed that detail before now. Why in the hell did Sega give the Hang-On license to the frickin' Kileak people? The universe is a mystery like that sometimes.
That's all beside the point of the game itself. This is an arcade-style Racing game, but notably this is not a port of an arcade game. We're dealing with a Saturn original here. There are three race environments with two track configurations (short and long) each. You can't race on the long tracks without placing at the top of the race on the short tracks. You have ten bikes to choose from that each have different stats, so there's that at least. Finally, you can go around the tracks in either Time Trial or Race modes. That's it. There seems to be some minor unlockable stuff for beating the long races, but it isn't much. There just isn't a lot going on here.
The UI is kind of a lot
So, there isn't much here, but is it fun? Not really, but it also isn't that miserable either. That isn't to say it's bad, I've just never been a fan of the way Hang-On games feel. The way these games handle turning has always felt terrible to me, and this one didn't disabuse me of that feeling. If you can get a handle of the controls, then it ends up being like Daytona USA but for motorcycles. The textured polygons look ok, but the draw distance isn't awesome, and while the graphics are more stable than in Daytona or Cyber Speedway, that also isn't saying much. The music also occupies that awkward space where it's good but not great or memorable. Hopefully this all sounds as meh as it felt. The thing feels like a scaler race, but it was developed in '95 when you couldn't get away with that anymore.
The environments aren't that interesting
There is a weird quirk where after every race the game asked me to input initials, but then it didn't surface any kind of leaderboard and instead kicked me to the title screen. I even dug around to look for a scoring or timing board but didn't find anything. Maybe you only get to see it by winning a race, which I never did. If it's '96 and you could get this game for a discount, it could have been a good way to kill time. Reviewers at the time were as nonplussed then as I am now, and this game seems to have made no impact on anything. That's kind of insane, considering how big a deal the first two Hang-Ons were. This series went out not with a bang, but a shrug, which is a bad omen for the Saturn.
January is now done and dusted, and we were fortunate enough to have some games that missed the '95 holiday season to keep us company. Though, the presence of World Series Golf is a harbinger for the months to come. Ah well, early '96 was a bad time for video games all around so we can't fault this console too much…YET.
I'm going to try to be fair to this game. To do this, let's see if we can put ourselves into a 1993 mindset. The world is still shaky in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia is in the middle of ripping itself apart, the European Union is being formed, Jiang Zemin is starting to flex China's muscles, and ol' Billy C has become the American president after beating George Bush in a saxophone contest. In pop culture, this is the year where Spielberg showed the world that CG dinosaurs are cool and that the Holocaust was bad. The kids who think they're cool are listening to Smashing Pumpkins, the kids who know they're cool are listening to the Judgement Night soundtrack, and everyone else is listening to Whitney Houston. In video games, Fighting and FMV games are coming into their own, Doom is about to rip and tear its way across PCs, and congress has gotten itself into a full moral panic over Night Trap's PG horror antics.
Specifically, Star Wars is going through one of its cyclical upswings in the video game market. The Super Star Wars series is well underway on the SNES, Sega's Star Wars Arcade is doing well enough, and the first entry in the X-Wing series has just come out on PCs. But LucasArts' biggest game has only just now arrived, the much-hyped Rebel Assault. This thing carries the promise of fully utilizing the CD-ROM format to put you, dear reader, directly into the action of the beloved Star Wars trilogy with cinematic flourish. Even though that trilogy had wrapped up a full decade ago, you filthy fucking nerds have an insatiable appetite for Star Wars junk. As such, this game is one of the most anticipated releases of the year.
Hey, remember that one part from the thing?
So, how is it? If you have no standards, it's great. You get to fly around Tatooine, Hoth, and the Death Star and take part in different 'realistic' events from the movies. If you have any standards whatsoever, it's unmitigated dogshit with no redeeming value. Rebel Assault is a Rail Shooter with cutscenes and a few environments that utilize FMV footage of real LucasArts models, kinda like a Star Wars version of Sewer Shark. In its 15 levels, the game pretends to have gameplay variety by switching your vehicle view from level to level. Sometimes it's a behind-the-back view that makes me think of the future Novastorm more than anything else, other times it's a basic cockpit view where you move the reticule around the screen and occasionally have a very little bit of navigation control, a couple of times it goes isometric for you to shoot at ground targets, and on one occasion it turns into a Hogan's Alley style shooting gallery. Regardless of what you're seeing, you move a reticule around the screen to shoot stuff while trying to dodge obstacles.
It's like I'm in the action!
Being the 3DO release of a PC game, the d-pad controls for moving anything around are abjectly terrible. The framerate and overall stability changes from level to level, and on at least one occasion becomes borderline unplayable. You can take what would otherwise be a decent amount of damage and you have three extra lives. Playing this thing is fuckey enough that this will not be enough for most people to get through the game, even on easy. Though, because this game was marketed towards normies, the password for your furthest level is automatically stored so that you can pick up where you left off with only a score penalty; and since this isn't an arcade game, the score could not matter less. The relative humanism of the progression allowed me to get to level 13 or 14 before I rage quit. I cannot restate enough how miserable it is to play this thing. The levels are badly thought out, the obstacles are badly telegraphed, the lock on is weak, and nothing about the interaction is fun in any way.
I hope you like canyon runs
Yet, this game wasn't made to be played, it was made to be watched. It seems like there was a concerted effort to incorporate movie stills, art assets, and even a few real models from the trilogy. It also uses typical Star Wars music and fully acted voice roles with the NEXT GEN power of the CD-ROM. Since the production was the main point of this thing, that part at least must be good, right? Not even a little bit. What FMV or rotoscoped objects that were used are so badly compressed that they are almost indistinguishable from the piss ugly rendered objects. The developers don't seem to have been able to fit actual movie clips, so they compromised by using still pictures with voice-over. Yet the absolute worst part is the mouths. Some cutscenes use still photos with a moving mouth animating on characters' motionless faces. It's not the same, but the effect reminded me of those old Quizznos commercials. Combined with how badly compressed everything is, those attempts at character animation are either hilarious or psychologically damaging depending on your tolerances. Overall, this entire game is an eyesore from beginning to end.
It's for the best that there aren't any teeth
It's shocking that this era of LucasArts would crap out something so thoroughly abysmal. I haven't even gotten into the brain-dead stupidity of the plot, which would require unpacking the relationships between Lucasfilm, the Expanded Universe, and 90's Star Wars fans. Without writing a thesis, this thing is the worst kind of cloying fan service and I'm glad Disney paved over all this nonsense, to replace with their own nonsense. But hey, the PC version still sold seemingly over a million copies back in its day, so what do I know?
Time to Punished For My Foolish Resistance: 24 Minutes
Now we have this weird little piece of almost nothing. The opening cutscene tries to have cinematic flare with production credits and an extensive lore dump read out by Michael Dorn. Watching this gave me the impression that the game would be some kind of Space Sim or Rail Shooter. Instead, on starting the game we're dumped in a hover tank in the middle of a featureless desert with random enemies wandering around. You have infinite ammo, seven limited use abilities, score meter, radar, and a health bar. There's no direction or recognizable level design. You drive around shooting enemies and an area boss may or may not show up to fight you. If it does show up and you kill it, you get to move on to the next area, which has a different color palette and slightly harder enemies.
It seems like you're supposed to rinse and repeat that gameplay loop until you eventually reach the final boss. There are supposed to be health refill stations somewhere, but I never saw them on any of my runs. The aforementioned secondary abilities are cloak, overshield, jump, mines, "cat's eye," super-cannon, and boost. They each have three uses and enemies will occasionally drop a refill for a single unit of whatever you have equipped. That's it. This game has nothing else going on. There's a small tutorial codex that'll show different object models and kinda say what each does. There's nothing else to do.
It's just this
This game feels like a job half done. This might have been enough to keep someone's attention in the early-80's, but by 1993 there needed to be a little bit more going on than this. If there were any kind of objectives, set connections between areas, or dialogue then we would have an honest-to-goodness video game on our hands. What we actually have feels inconsiderable, even for our already low standards with the 3DO.
I did a little bit of digging on the developer, Dynamix. It turns out this game is something like the fourth entry in the Stellar 7 series, which startied on PCs back in '83. Apparently, the gameplay didn't evolve much in the intervening decade. Dynamix also seems to have gone on to create the Incredible Machine and Tribes franchises. The studio eventually petered out at the turn of the century and their 20-year record is one of the more eclectic grab-bags I've seen. These guys apparently made the first MechWarrior game in 1989? I have no idea what to make of any of this.
Time to Failing My Interior Design Class: 35 Minutes*
Well, if it isn't our old enigmatic acquaintance, Microcabin. Their output in the 90's can charitably be classified as all over the place. They started the decade by wrapping up their JRPG series, Xak, and they would go on to fiddle around with the Riglord Saga of Tactical RPGs, some more one-off JRPGs, a 'Shmup, a Visual Novel, a Match Three Puzzle game, and then whatever in the hell this is supposed to be.
The Life Stage: Virtual House is a piece of clunky home design software released exclusively for the 3DO. You create the dimensions of rooms, connect them, decorate the interiors, and walk around in them. That's the entire crux of the game. There are a wide variety of textures you can put on the interior surfaces of the rooms, different outdoor environments to look at through the windows, and some variety in the objects you can use to decorate. The game also comes with eight preset houses that act as reference samples.
Having to control this interface with a 3Do pad belongs in one of the circles of hell
Having to interact with any facet of this thing is where the whole experience falls apart. First, the load times are egregious, even by 3DO standards. When using the first-person view mode, you move in what can only be described as seconds per frame, the input lag makes it feel like you're trying to remote control a moon rover from your living room. Then there's the design interface. 3D modeling interfaces are hard, simplifying them for general audiences is harder still, and using a 3DO pad for it makes the whole thing completely unmanageable. In the fiddling around I did with it, I was never able to find the option to place objects or doors. I probably should have looked up the manual, but it wasn't worth the effort.
The sample houses include this nightmare fuel
I'm scratching my head thinking who this was for. I'm not finding much in the way of info for this thing, so I can only make assumptions. I remember in my teen years having a girlfriend who would fiddle around with a website that let people design their dream homes, and it of course had more options and a better interface than this thing. Maybe this was supposed to be daydream assistance tool targeted at an audience I know nothing about. The little girl game mascot is probably a clue to that one. It's still difficult to imagine how that target audience would have had access to a 3DO, especially in '93 or '94. I also have no idea why a JRPG studio of all places would have been the ones making this. Just a bizarre and forgettable thing.
As can be seen from the title, Twisted: The Game Show is a Quiz-Board-Party game that you could charitably think of as a precursor to You Don't Know Jack and Mario Party. The idea is that you and up to five other unwilling victims share a controller to take turns playing the fictional game show Twisted, where make your way up a 100-step spiral game board by rolling a 'Cyber Die', playing minigames, answering trivia, and stomaching the very early-90's humor.
You choose to play as one of six exaggerated infomercial personalities, who are all unfortunately portrayed by FMV actors, and roll a random number to move to one of a few types of spaces. It uses the standard Lose a Turn, Roll Again, Lose Several Turns, and Challenge square types. The way it handles challenges is mildly interesting, a 3x3 game board pops up with randomized options, an opposing player chooses the row, and the challenged player chooses the column. The options on this board include different kinds of trivia, a variety of bad minigames, Extra Turn, Lose a Turn, and switching places with an opponent. The non-random and semi-adversarial nature of this board could lead to interesting multiplayer dynamics in a better game. Regardless, once you answer the trivia or play the minigame you either take another turn or the game moves on to the next player.
Uh, at least the visuals are bright and colorful?
The minigames are different variations on simple matching puzzles. You're either matching pictures, sounds, unscrambling a video, or some other bullshit. It's really not worth getting into. The trivia breaks down into the expected Trivial Pursuits categories, but with the extra wrinkle of being 30 years out of date. How's your American sports trivia for the 60's, 70's, and 80's? Not great? Then you're going to have a bad time. Like any trivia game from any time period, it assumes that you've been around for the last 20 or 30 years before the publish date. That's why trivia game difficulty typically increases exponentially as it ages.
Now we have to address the main selling point of this thing: the humor. The writing feels like it came from rejected sketch show bits. I should give examples, but I really don't want to. It's bad. None of the jokes land, but at least It's not any more bigoted than most contemporary humor. There's something mesmerizing about a joke-a-minute comedy where every single joke fails. Maybe young men in the early-90's would have gotten chuckles out of it, which would explain why it reviewed well at the time. The only thing I saw that got a giggle out of me was the Host's name, Twink Fizzdale, and that's only funny because they had no idea what the future meaning would be. Though, I can't vouch for the quality of the ending, as the emulator will randomly soft-lock on Twink at some point in any playthrough.
The soft-locked Twink himself
The FMV is relatively well done by '93 standards and the CG works for what it is, but the audio quality for all the spoken humor is junky to the point of occasional incomprehensibility. This should be a forgettable piece of nonsense, but we need to stop and consider it a bit more closely. I've been trying to figure out if there were any minigame-heavy board games before this thing. I'm thinking in the vein of the Mario Party games. Is this the first one of these? Also, it seems like Game Show games were all based on existing properties before this point, so is this the first original Game Show video game? That would make this a predecessor to stuff like You Don't Know Jack. I'm very worried that this game is important, which is why I don't want to do the research to find out.
That's a wrap for 1993. The 3DO managed 14 titles that could generously be called video games during its first three months on the market. There's more to be said about this launch and what comes ahead in '94, but that will need to wait. In two weeks, we're going to truly scrape the bottom of the barrel. We're going to hit rock bottom, really wallow in the dregs of what video games have to offer. That's because the 3DO wasn't the only next generation console that launched in 1993. That's right, in two weeks we’re trekking into the forgotten wastes with All Jaguar Games In Order! Because it's the Atari Jaguar, we'll only need one post to get through all the '93 games. YES THAT'S FORESHADOWING.
Time to Looking Up The Manual And Restarting: 30 Minutes
Time to Being A Pathetic Descendent Of Monkeys: 2 Hours
This game feels more important than it probably is. For the uninitiated, this is the third entry in the Wing Commander series of story-heavy Space Sims, done in the classic style. That style leans heavily into the sim part of the genre, erring on the side of fiddly, complex controls that only a Steel Battalion fan could love. This third entry was originally released for the PC in '94, and it shows. We'll get to the in-game graphics later, but the immediately obvious thing is that the story picks up and goes with the assumption that the player is fully knowledgeable of the events from the previous games and expansions.
I personally dislike the phrase 'Space Opera.' Partially because operas are dull and you shouldn't call something that if there isn't singing, but mainly because that label strains under decades of redefinition and broadening. The term has arrived at the present day with so little meaning that any story with a spaceship could be called a Space Opera. The only qualifications for a work of fiction to fall under that label are to be set in space and not be overtly comedic. It's a useless genre classification and the name doesn't describe its meaning in any understandable way, if such meaning even exists. That said, Wing Commander III is a textbook example of a Space Opera.
A serious game for grown-ups
You play as the series protagonist Colonel Blair (Mark Hamill), who gets reassigned to be the wing commander of an old shitbox space carrier by the perpetually hostile Admiral Tolwyn (Malcolm McDowell) after the ship from the last game is wrecked. Blair's love interest from the previous game (Yolanda Jilot) is being held in captivity by the bad guys and is thus a non-entity. The other pilots In Blair's new wing all have personalities and are fully acted, the most recognizable ones being portrayed by Tom F. Wilson and Francois Chau. The ship's captain (Jason Bernard), comms officer (Courtney Gains), and chief mechanic (Ginger Lynn Allen, if you're old enough to recognize that name don't forget your CPAP tonight) are also featured prominently. There's a metric ton of FMV featuring all these people, which I would call the most competent I've seen so far in spite of the laughably bad CG sets.
The plot itself follows these characters at the end of a decades-long war between the human Confederation and a space empire of large cat people called the Kilrathi. There are twists and turns, including a lot with the one Kilrathi crewmember who is totally not a Worf knock-off. None of this carries as much weight as the game would want, in part because everything has to lead to space combat missions. Blair inherently isn't going to go face-to-face with the villains because of the gameplay constraints. It should also go without saying that the dialogue is bad, but I've seen worse from modern games so I'm not going to get hung up on it. The live action scenes are shot competently, and the actors do what they can with the material, which in 1994 would have been the best yet seen in a video game.
Green screens are hard
The game which this is all wrapped around is a technical Space Shooter where you fly a fighter on missions to shoot various things for various reasons. The first four missions I did were two patrols and two escort missions, but from what I know there are planetary bombings, capital ship battles, boss fights, and probably a few more types later in the game. You fly those missions at a cadence that would be familiar to anyone who's played a Bioware game in the last 20 years. You click between screens on the carrier for cutscenes, go into a mission, return, and repeat. You can bring one of the other pilots as your wingman on missions, with each apparently having their own AI quirks that are influenced by how you interact with them on the ship. Those wingmen can also get killed off after certain story points if things go sideways, though from what I've read most of them get killed off in the story no matter what. There's a lot of nuance with the systems here for a game in the mid-90's, which is commendable.
The flying physics are more like a Flight Combat game than anything else
What isn't commendable is the control scheme. Jesus fucking Christ these controls. Since this was originally a highly technical PC game, there were more input buttons than are available on a PS1 controller. This is true of most PC games, and each has had varying degrees of luck in making the adaptation. Origin seems to have been unwilling to compromise on the depth of control options for this port. Can you guess how many unique button inputs there are for the space missions? When I say 'button input' I'm talking about a unique action that is taken when pressing a button or simultaneous combination of buttons, e.g. if Square and Triangle both do the same thing then that's only one input, and if L1+Cross does something different than L1 or Cross individually then that counts as its own separate input. With that in mind, how many inputs do you think there are? I have the game manual open in front of me and I lost track at 38. There are 14 total buttons on the controller, which averages out to about 2.7 inputs for every button. You literally have to hold the select button while using the d-pad to access necessary functions. Learning and keeping track of all the various finger contortions necessary to play this thing presents a massive and immediate learning curve.
You babysit more space trucks than you would want
The truly twisted thing is that once you wrap your head and other extremities around the controls, the game is completely fine. There are wide ranging difficulty options that seemingly let anyone of any skill level get through the game, which is extremely humanistic for the time, though I imagine Origin would want players to see the cutscenes that they put so much effort into. The game will also let you continue forward when you fail a mission, which seems to be a series staple. This is a very early example of having Your Choices Matter™ in video games, which is impressive for the time. Now, cramming all this into a game is going to have one important consequence, in that this thing is almost 2 Gb in size. The fucker comes on five CDs, which should be an illegal number of discs for a PS1 game. This thing is massive, and with the different difficulty options and dialogue paths there would have been real replay value for anyone who bought it.
Wing Commander III is a complete enough experience that it invites a higher level of critique than other games we've seen so far. I've been giving games from this era significant handicaps in my evaluations. If I'm being honest, a lot of these things are shallow, disposable amusements or only one step above children's toys. That's just the way video games were back in the day, and most of these are at best mediocre by modern standards. This game, though, has enough to bite into that it's hard to not judge it by more advanced expectations. The issue is that it doesn’t really meet those expectations. The world building is sloppy and incoherent, the characters are one-dimensional, the controls are convoluted, the acting is hit-and-miss, the gameplay has uneven pacing, it isn't visually interesting, and it lacks the depth of system interdependency that we would expect from something that feels like a cross between Mass Effect and Elite Dangerous. Of course, this is an ancestor to modern Bioware-style RPGs and Space Sims, but it gets close enough that it's too easy to compare this thing with games 10 or 20 years its junior.
Good luck figuring out how to land without the manual
After all that, you would think this thing is super important in the history of video games, but it kinda isn't. The Wing Commander franchise started in 1990, burned brightly by the standards of 90's PC gaming, and flamed out by the year 2000. This is partially due to the series creator and director, Chris Roberts, pulling a Sakaguchi and flaming himself out on an ill-fated Hollywood production. The basic game structure from this series would be done better by Bioware later in the 2000's and Space Sims would recede into semi-obscurity until well into the 2010's. Wing Commander has almost no legacy to speak of in our current day, outside of odd trivia about Mark Hamill's filmography. I don't know what to make of that.
This is the first time I've ever seen or touched this game, and now that I have, I'm mildly furious that it spawned a long-running franchise. This was such a maddening experience, and it didn't deserve any sequels.
Road & Track: The Game is a straightforward Sim Racing game in the pre-Gran Turismo style. There are eight cars that can be raced on six tracks in time trial, head-to-head, single race, and tournament modes. The big draw here is the Road & Track partnership. Each of the cars is lovingly cataloged, with detailed interiors and car noises. Really, this experience is two different things crammed together. Aside from the racing, there's a whole menu that takes you through different narrated stat screens and video clips for each car. This stuff in unabashed car porn, and the guys who made this would have fucked these vehicles if they could have gotten away with it.
But what's its blood type?
The racing itself is extremely technical. What I mean is that, being a sim, it expects you to learn the ideal lines through the different tracks and the braking points for each car type to take those lines. You literally cannot win a race if you don't do this. Since this originally came out for the frickin' 3DO in 1994, there are zero concessions to tutorialization or quality of life; you gotta git gud, bitch. There are no difficulty settings or different race difficulty tiers. Ridge Racer only has one track and it even has a difficulty on-ramp. There's no excuse for this horseshit. Just about every other racing game on consoles at the time were more fun than this thing.
It turns out that the Time Trial mode is the most enjoyable part of the game. This is possible because the actual driving model feels basically fine. The handling is supposed to be as realistic as they could get in '94, the interior views look nice, and the sound effects are probably the best they could do at the time, which makes this the opposite of High Velocity. This is to the point that grinding up against a guardrail actively caused me to wince because of the believable metal-on-metal screeching. The developers also seem to have figured out the trick to not having pop-in, which is always to a game's merit. Not to the game's merit are the car models, which would have been advanced for the time but look hilarious now. Finally, the soundtrack consists of bad butt rock, which I guess also makes this the opposite of Road Rash which had good butt rock.
Mmm, chunky Lambo
Need & Speed Presents: The Road for Track apparently sold really well, presumably because motherfuckers had no taste. This might have been the worst racing game for Playstation at the time of its release, which is why it generally reviewed well. This was all successful enough to inspire a sequel in '97 and then damn near every subsequent year until 2013, when it moved to an every-other-year cycle. I generally like the modern Need for Speed games and Razor Callahan is a vital part of gaming history, but holy crap was this first game not deserving of a sequel.
I've been cooking up something to do with this franchise, irrespective of this review. So, stay tuned for more on that at some point in the near future.
Time to Gutter Ball Or Something I Don't Know: 26 Minutes
Now we get to be subjected to the PS1's first Pinball game. Somehow, this thing has accomplished something that I never wanted to see: it's worse than Last Gladiators.
Extreme Pinball originally came out for PCs in 1995 and received as lukewarm a reception as was possible. Following that rousing success, it was ported to the PS1 and was rewarded with an actively hostile reception. So, this is memorably bad, right? Nope. There are four pinball boards, none of which are particularly interesting in either their functional or visual design. Unlike Last Gladiators, the camera is super zoomed in like a GBA pinball game, which creates an opposite set of problems. When the ball really gets going and shoots straight downward, there is extremely little time to react once the camera pans to the bottom of the table. Also, the physics feel wrong in ways that I can't properly express.
This is somehow the best table in the game
There are a handful of fanciful effects that wouldn't be possible on a real table, which I guess gives this thing one up on Last Gladiators. Yet, the flow of the action and overall layout of the boards feels amateurish and poorly thought out, which is the last thing you would want in a Pinball game. There's very little going on in this package, there aren't even pre-filled high scores to play against. If I had to rank the tables on offer, they would be: Monkey Mayhem, Urban Chaos, Medieval Knights, Rock Fantasy. That last one is surprisingly abysmal.
Truly an uninspiring first console release for the co-developers Digital Extremes and Epic MegaGames. Epic especially hasn't put out anything of value before this point, unless you're some kind of Jazz Jackrabbit sicko, and I don't think that group of chuckleheads will ever amount to anything.
We're closing out this season of PS1 games with something that feels less important than it actually is. This game was a commercial and critical phenomenon and was the first true mega-hit for the system, to the point that it is apparently the 17th best-selling Playstation game of all time. This thing will go on to spawn a truly massive media franchise with not only its direct sequels, but also more spin-offs, movies, and novelizations than is advisable. I'm not being particularly hyperbolic by saying this is the point when the PS1 era really began. Not just because of the popularity, but also the impact this thing had on 3D game design standards going forward. Resident Evil is massively influential on every level. I also despise playing the goddamned piece of shit.
For anyone who has spent the last 30 years in a coma, the premise of the game is that you play as a special, SWAT-adjacent cop from Raccoon City. Your team helicopters out to the middle of the woods looking for a cannibal cult, gets attacked by zombie dogs, and ends up in a spooky mansion. Everyone splits up immediately, and you have to uncover the evil nature of the mansion's residents while fighting zombies, biomonsters, oversized creepy crawlies, and obnoxious inventory puzzles. The opening FMV is probably the greatest nonsense in the history of video games; it's a full blend of stupid, half-assed, sincere, and bizarre creative decisions and it's perfect. The English language text and voice acting in the rest of the game is famous for being terrible in every way, which it absolutely is. All the plot and character work in this thing are delightfully stupid, and the best part is that I can't tell whether or not it's intentional.
That's one way of putting it
Though, the story is probably supposed to be at least a little scary. I'm assuming that because everything else about the visual, audio, and game design are geared to elicit as much fear, dread, and shock as possible. The biggest feature here is the fixed camera angle that changes room-to-room and screen-to-screen. It's a very clever way to integrate pre-rendered graphics with action gameplay in a way that reinforces the setting and atmosphere. There are like a thousand video essays out there breaking down the specifics of how the layout, art, sound, music, camera, and puzzle design reinforce the driving need to stress out the player in both subtle and overt ways. I don't want to relitigate any of that, and even if I did, I lack the pretentious video essay voice to pull it off.
What I will litigate here is the controls and overall feeling of trying to play the thing. This is supposed to be a video game, after all. The game is infamous for its 'tank control' scheme, which I won't dig into as a label or concept, which involves using the d-pad to rotate, advance, and reverse the player character respective to the character and not the camera angle. This means that pushing Up on the d-pad will move the character in the direction they're facing and Left will rotate them to their left, whether you're looking at their front or back. Because the camera direction is constantly changing, this control scheme is what you could scientifically call "a real bastard." When I was young and naïve, I thought this was done because people in the 90's didn't know how to make good games. Being older and wiser, I know that they absolutely did and that this nonsense was intentional; the shit controls are supposed to add to the tension.
Pre-rendered walls are hard
That brings us to the reason why I bounced after 20 minutes with this game: it plays like zombified dogshit. The combat is miserable, the controls are bad, and there is nothing but frustration to be had. I know that's the point, if you're having fun then you aren't scared, in theory. My question is, does being stressful and annoying count as horror? This is put together with great care to make an attempt at interactive Horror, but is this the way to achieve it? Does being generally stressed into a fight or flight response count as experiencing horror? I personally don't believe so, but I also wouldn't call movies that traffic in gross out effects or torture porn as Horror so I'm probably an outlier. People at the time seem to have found this game widely appealing, as it spawned the whole Survival Horror genre. I would guess that the presence of a tangible atmosphere, combined with gameplay that wove together 3D action, puzzles, and storytelling in a detailed, internally coherent environment is what did it. As such, I would credit this game as being the first modern 3D Action game more than anything else, which I also think is more important than popularizing the Survival Horror genre.
Regardless, we're going to be dealing with more games like this, in every sense, from here on out. This is both a blessing and a curse.
That's a wrap for the PS1 in the first quarter of 1996. This feels like the inflection point where things really start to get going for the Playstation, so hopefully it's mostly uphill from here. Let's update the official Ranking of All PS1 Games and see what's next.
1. Air Combat
…
14. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
28. Resident Evil
44. Extreme Pinball
46. Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed
…
77. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time, we're going to switch tracks and rewind back to 1/1/96 to take a tour through the goings-on of the Sega Saturn. That system has 21 releases in the first three months of '96, and it'll take about three weeks to get through it all. Now, the reason I wrote 'next time' instead of 'next week' is that I'm taking next week off to get the next batch of posts spun up. So, let's all meet back here in two weeks for All Saturn Games In Order: January 1996, where we'll come to grips with Wing Arms, NFL Quarterback Club '96, Mortal Kombat II, World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, Darius Gaiden, and Hang-On GP.
This is 99% identical to the Saturn version, and everything I said about that also applies here. The only thing I can add is that managing multiple cities is way more complicated than you would normally want. Each city you own has actions taken independently of the others, with the number and types of actions available dependent on the officers you have stationed in those cities. The Money, Food, Soldier, and Horse resources are not shared between cities, and can only be moved by convoy, which if not properly escorted end up captured by bandits. This feels a lot like the kind of finicky crap that you would find in 80's computer games, which is where this series has its roots. Even still, I would rather play this over Panzer General, cause fuck 'em.
Oh no. Anyway..
That's not a lot. So, let's talk about the source material. Fun fact #1: There's a big dumb statue of Guan Yu in Jingzhou. This isn't like one of those ancient Buddhist stone statues, it's made of bronze and was completed in 2016. I went to see it in 2019, because it's one of those tourist traps you make a point to see when you’re in the general area. There's a two story 'cultural center' in the base that contains a wide variety of art and memorabilia glorifying Guan Yu. None of this stuff is old, so it isn't a museum. There's even a seven-foot-tall statue in there using a very unlicensed likeness of Guan Yu from the Dynasty Warriors franchise. I would recommend visiting it, but I'm not sure where it is. Apparently, the year after I went, the locals in Jingzhou got tired of seeing the damn thing and the city government declared that it was going to somehow move it out of the city center and to a nearby village. I find all of this to be massively amusing, and I will keep y'all updated when I learn more.
Literal vacation pic
Fun fact #2: Guan Yu's horse in the book is a famous character in its own right. It's called Red Hare and it was supposedly the greatest horse of its time. The traits ascribed to it make the thing sound almost like an ancient Chinese Shadowfax. There's even a short musical number about it in the 90's TV adaptation, which I'm including below. There's a whole thing with that horse in the book, but I went through the details in the video description and I don't feel like copy-pasting all that here.
That does it for now. It seems like I'll be able to avoid Koei strategy games for a while after this, which means I can continue fulfilling my ambition to not learn the meta for this franchise.
Time to Venusian Insertion If You Know What I Mean: 66 Minutes
I fell into the old trap of having expectations before starting this game, which almost always gets me into trouble. Fortunately, Descent largely lives up to the hype. This is a mostly direct port of the 1995 PC original, with a couple of differences that we'll get to later. For those unaware, this is the first game in the short-lived Six Degrees of Freedom genre of Shooters. The idea with this genre is that the player controls some kind of vehicle that is able to move and rotate in three dimensions. That's movement on 3 axes plus rotation on those 3 axes equals 6 degrees of movement. Implementing this kind of movement into a fully 3D video game was revolutionary, and all modern zero-g control schemes descend from this game.
The premise kind of doesn't matter. You're a mercenary drone pilot guy working for a nefarious space corporation whose mining robots have gone haywire all over the solar system. It's your job to clean out the affected mines of hostiles and blow their reactors. There's some stuff about the space corp causing the malfunctions through their wanton tinkering with alien thingys, but none of it is worth caring about. This set-up takes you through 27 levels, spread across 9 celestial bodies. I made it to the fourth level, which is the first in the Venus segment, in about an hour on easy, so there's plenty of stuff to do here. It's always nice to run into a game that is both competent and substantial from this era.
It's very easy to lose your bearings and get upside down
The levels themselves follow closely to the maze standards established by Doom. You collect keycards, find various pick-ups, and kill everything that moves. The design for all this fundamentally works and is thus hard to comment on. There's one mission type that's reused in every level, which is to blow the reactor and escape. This incorporates a countdown timer like in Super Metroid, except in every level. The placement of keycards, enemies, and the exit tend to be well considered and makes sense; though it makes a bit too much sense, as you can get a feel for predicting where things are in the levels just from using common sense. I'm struggling to find things to say about the design that isn't just calling it good and moving on. This is a solid B+ or A- kind of game, which is the hardest to write about.
Let's try negativity, I'm good at that. I take semantic umbrage with assigning the PS1 port of this game to the 6DOF genre. When you stop and think, moving something in a full six degrees of mechanical freedom is going to require 12 inputs, one for each direction of each degree. When you look at a PS1 controller, there are 12 inputs plus start and select. You can see the obvious problem: how does this game accomplish 6DOF movement while also letting you do anything that isn't movement? If you guessed, "remove one of the degrees of freedom, I guess" then you would be too correct. Movement along the y-axis (floating up and down) is not available in the controls, which actually makes this a 5DOF game. This entire genre is built on lies.
SHENANIGANS
This brings us to the quality of this port as a whole. Descent seems to have gotten the Doom treatment in the port job, in that simplified geometry was traded for colored lighting and ambient music. That makes this version somewhat of its own thing compared to the original release, at least in aesthetic terms. And that aesthetic is mostly fine. The music works, the draw distance is fine, everything is appropriately textured, and the gameplay runs smoothly enough for enough of the time. Though, the wireframed automap runs like unmitigated trash in a way that felt like the game was about to hard-lock at any moment whenever I had it open. The issue is that while the environments are well-realized for what they are, the thing that they're trying to be is dull and repetitive. Every level is a mining site, with little variation in the visual design. The overall effect of the art design, when coupled with the disorienting movement, led me to a point where I felt like I was going to swallow my tongue if I didn't stop playing. So I guess only consider playing this game in short bursts.
You can also rescue little guys for extra points if you feel like it
As far as I'm concerned, Descent was the biggest deal among the various shooters that attempted to figure out the genre in-between Doom II and Quake. I briefly touched on that time period a couple of posts ago, but it is an interesting era to think about. Everyone knew that so much more could be done from the base Doom formula, but no one had all the answers. This led to all kinds of studios tweaking different aspects of the formula, whether it's this game's 6DOF controls, the various Shooters where you could look up and down with buttons, or the Shooters that incorporated heavy story or voiced elements. The actual correct answer came out with Quake in '96, putting everyone back where they started, but the two years before that was a real wild west.
Speaking of developments in the shooter space, let's talk about 'Shmups. As far as I know, the mid-90's is when the genre began transitioning towards niche Bullet Hell design and away from anything normal humans could enjoy. Yet, increased bullet density wasn't the only path the genre could have taken to make itself inaccessible. A handful of lunatics at Irem spent the early-90's figuring out their own niche in the genre: Run-and-Gun shooters with enormous hitboxes and visual chaos. That small group would leave Irem in '94 to form their own studio, called Nazca Corporation, and fulfill their dreams of making fucked up bullshit. In 1996, they finally accomplished their goal and released Metal Slug upon the world. There is much to be said about that series, but this is neither the time nor the place.
The screen can get visually busy
In the Hunt is not Metal Slug, but it is one of the three games that I would classify as proto-Metal Slugs. Originally released for arcades in 1993, this would be the second attempt at Irem by Metal Slug designer Kazuma Kujo to make a frenetic side-scrolling shooter with large, cartoony sprites. The other two attempts were GunForce I and II in '91 and '94 respectively. This game is a unique entry, in that you play as a submarine, which is enough of a conceptual change to impact the gameplay. Normally in a Run-and-Gun, like Contra, you run in a direction while firing in four or eight directions while doing some platforming if it's a side-scroller. In the Hunt has you moving in one direction while only being able to fire forward, up, and drop depth charges below. This simplicity is made up for by having the screen divided into above-water and underwater areas, and your up-attack can only reach surface targets if you keep your submarine at the surface line. This leads to a trade-off and adds a little bit of complexity to most of the levels. Otherwise, the experience is literally straightforward.
This is one of those games where you keep the fire button held down at all times
Because this is a glorified Metal Slug prototype, the art and music are generally very good even if not to the levels this development team would eventually reach. The game runs smoothly, which is vital for something that requires any quick reflexes. Also, probably because of its simplified gameplay, it's a bit easier than what you would expect from its pedigree. I made two runs and got as far as the fourth boss. Since this game only has six levels, I was able to make it two-thirds of the way through in less than half an hour. It's probably very feasible to beat this thing in only a handful of hours. Most 'Shmup sickos would consider that too easy, and it presents an issue for anyone who would've bought a full price disc back in '96. This really should have been part of some kind of Irem compilation instead of a standalone release, and I think we're on the cusp of publishers not being able to get away with doing this.
I didn't make any mention of the plot because it's barely there and could not matter less. This game also does that thing that console 'Shmups love by having a strict continue limit. I'm not harping on it too much here, as it actually seems feasible to beat this game on only five credits, which is a first. This is a neat little thing to poke around with, but I truly feel for any schmucks that bought it at retail prices back in the day.
Now we have to deal with this nonsense. Being a Bullfrog game, Magic Carpet wants to wow you by not conforming to any specific genre of the time. But In reality, this is a combination of bad early Real Time Strategy systems with bad Flight Combat gameplay. This nature is initially obfuscated by the expected Molyneux whimsy and a complete lack of interest in explaining itself. Something inside of me breaks when trying to form a take on this one, so let's walk through the details.
This thing is set in some kind of 1001 Arabian Nights knock-off world with warring wizards. You play as the apprentice to an old wizard who is trying to stop the Wizard Wars, which I imagine is the Potterverse version of Storage Wars. The old wizard eats it, so you have to hop on a magic carpet to fly around and finish the job. This is where I'll note that development of this game began after the release of Disney's Aladdin AND IT SHOWS. Also, if I'm going to keep reviewing British video games, I'll need to get around to reading Orientalism.
WWGD - What Would Goku Do?
Starting the game dumps you into the first level with no introduction to the game mechanics. After learning how to play this the hard way, it turns out the point of the game is to fly around the levels, spawn tent bases, and kill various monster enemies. So, monsters will drop golden orbs of varying sizes after they die. You're supposed to use a spell, which are just your selectable attacks, to claim the orbs when they're lying around. Your tent bases spawn hot air balloons, which will float over to the orbs you've claimed and collect them to bring back to the tents. As those orbs are collected, a secondary bar on the tent status card will fill up, and once that hits a certain point you win the level. In addition to yourself and the baddies, there are civilian towns in each map that have non-descript NPCs running around. These don't matter at all in the early levels.
The flying gameplay feels like a cross between Agile Warrior F111-X and Black Fire, in that it's utter dogshit. The carpet accelerates and maneuvers like a plane but can be slowed down to hover like a helicopter. This movement feels terrible and navigating around the levels never stops being awkward. There are two slots for spells, which can be swapped out at any time. There is no explanation of the spells in-game, and there seems to be 24 of the damn things that can be unlocked. The only ones I saw are the standard fireball, tent spawner, orb claimer, and speed boost. These are all on different cooldowns and the controls for swapping out spells are bad.
Yes, I eventually realized this spell does no damage
The combat is its own flavor of infuriating. I encountered three enemy types in the first two levels: ground-based turd snakes, flying turd snakes, and birds. The turd snakes will wander around and shoot fireballs if you get close enough, and they have better aim than you. The birds are the primary exhibit for the deranged game design used throughout this thing, the damnable things have small hitboxes, fly in swarms, turn faster than you, and attack you from behind in a way that can only be shaken off by boosting away. The only way to effectively fight the little bastards is fly a tight circle around the swarms, rapid fire the fireball, and get lucky. None of this is fun, and the combat is essential to collect enough orbs to finish the levels.
A forgiving quirk of the gameplay is that as long as you have one functioning tent base, you can respawn infinitely with only minor penalty. So, it kind of doesn't matter too much if you get repeatedly ripped apart by birds as long as your base is intact. Now, the bases and balloons have their own health bars and can be attacked by the MoBs. This seems to only be a problem in later levels. From reading the game manual, because I had to eventually, it seems that the bases will automatically upgrade themselves if you build enough next to each other, yet the tent spell is very picky about on what terrain it'll build a base. Also, the random NPCs are capable of doing things that are determined off of a rudimentary karma system. I didn't see this myself, and I'm disinclined to take Molyneux games at their word when it comes to game features.
It goes without saying that the draw distance is abysmal
For as miserable as Magic Carpet is, I would have played more of it if I hadn't encountered a weird soft lock. For whatever reason, partway through the second level, the balloon refused to leave my base to collect orbs. This made the level unbeatable. There might have been an obscure mechanical reason for this to happen or it might have been a bug, it's hard to tell the difference with Bullfrog games. Either way, I was too annoyed by that point to care, and I closed the game in disgust. Also, it should be implied by now that the game looks and sounds like ass.
This wretched thing was supposedly a big deal when it originally came out in '94. I guess having open, 3D environments rendered in real-time was enough of an achievement to earn high praise. That seems to be a theme for Bullfrog games, they would drop shoddily thrown together games in rapid succession which would each have one new or interesting idea or feature. Maybe I'm basing that opinion on the later reevaluations of Molyneux as an auteur, but it's hard not to incorporate future knowledge onto past events.
Even though this batch was all ports, we ended up with a better spread of games than the last few weeks. We're also rapidly approaching the end of Q1, and hopefully more noteworthy releases. Regardless, the Ranking of All PS1 Games requires attention.
1. Air Combat
…
8. Descent
31. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire
We're starting with the first of many Humongous Entertainment games to make the trek to the 3DO. For the uninitiated, Humongous was the video game studio co-founded by Ron Gilbert after he parted ways with LucasArts. In the 11 years after their first release in 1992, they put out something like 50 adventure and edutainment games for young children. If you have any distant memories of characters like Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, or Freddi Fish rattling around in your brainpan, it's because of Humongous. Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise seems to have been the second game the studio released, and we'll get to their first game later in this post. It shouldn't be a surprise that this thing plays like a small and very simplified version of an old SCUMM engine game for the aged 3 to 7 crowd.
Our boy Fatty is a teddy bear belonging to a young girl in a stereotypical suburban household. It's the night before her birthday and the various dolls and stuffed animals in her room come to life in order to prepare for the next day's festivities. Our bear Fats takes it upon himself to make a birthday cake while the rest of the crew decorates her room. You point and click around the house, collecting ingredients and dealing with a couple of side missions. The parents apparently got the little girl a puppy for her birthday and the damn thing gets out of its box and needs to be wrangled, and there are a handful of decorative letters that need to be collected for a Happy Birthday sign. You do these things, the cake basically bakes itself, and that's it.
You don't want to see that rabbit animate
There's only like 20 screens in the whole game if you count the bowling and cabbage dressing minigames. Fategar T. Bear has more inventory slots than he needs, so that's never a concern. This thing is literally baby's first point-and-click adventure, not even being pejorative. I got through it in an hour with a maximum of futzing around, and apparently there are speedruns of the game that last only four minutes. Now, the reason I finished this game instead of moving on after ten minutes is because I streamed it. Turns out people have way more patience with games when they're streaming them. So, my total time shouldn't be taken as an endorsement.
I feel kind of bad for even bringing this up, but the production values are pretty bad for an early-90's adventure game. There are bearly any character animations, and the voice acting is actively bad. Though, most objects in each screen will do something when clicked on, so there is a density of interactivity even if it isn't interesting. As for any educational value that would make it worthwhile from a parental point of view, it seems a bit light. I noticed some counting to five, familiarization of common kitchen objects, and instructions on bathing. There are also a couple of opportunities for self-expression with the aforementioned cabbage and the late game cake decoration. I have no idea if that is a good density of educational/socialization material by children's programming standards. Either way, this would have been fine if you were parking your kid in front of an MS-DOS machine. I'm not sure who in the hell was going to buy an expensive piece of multimedia equipment and then use it for their small child. Kids small enough for this game are dumb and destructive, and I wouldn't let one near my new $500 piece of kit.
Time to Developing Basic Problem Solving Skills: 35 Minutes
Because going in alphabetical order carries certain risks, we're going to talk about this Fatty Bear themed minigame collection. There are five whole entire minigames on offer: Reversi, Line-and-Box, Go Fish, a coloring book, and some block puzzles that the game refers to as pengrams. The competitive minigames have four difficulty options, none of which should be that hard for functioning adults. Those competitive games are all played against Fatty, and it really feels like he's letting you win.
Gonna card shark this bear
The non-competitive modes have a decent amount of stuff. There are 36 pictures to color and 20 pengrams to solve. This all seems to be geared towards developing fundamental problem-solving skills in the kiddos. The only things I can find to complain about, with all of these games if I'm going to be honest, is the d-pad controls of the onscreen cursor. This is always bad in every game before the invention of the analog stick. Lastly, the coloring book mode has only five base colors, which can be mixed into ten additional colors. That means your theoretical child only has 15 colors to work with, which seems overly limiting when used in system that has a 24-bit color palette.
Humongous sure did get in on the ground floor with the 3DO. It couldn't have hurt the marketing for the system, being able to put these games alongside stuff like Crash n' Burn, Escape From Monster Manor, and Rebel Assault to present the console as being something that the whole family could use. That's my theory at least.
It's difficult to untangle the wider significance of Lemmings from the game itself. Fortunately, my experiences with British game development in my PS1 retrospective series has led me to a place where I can chuck both this game and its legacy into the garbage without losing any sleep over it.
This game was originally released on the Amiga family of computers in 1991. It's mildly inexplicable success helped buoy the fortunes of DMA Designs, then a small second-rate development studio, into a place where they could go on to bigger projects. These days, that studio is called Rockstar North and they've spent the last decade (as of writing) raking-in cash from Grand Theft Auto Online while doing jack-all else. There are also claims that Lemmings invented the Real Time Strategy genre, which, NO. I haven't done the research, but categorically no. There's also a statue of Lemmings in a park in Rockstar's home city, because sure. What I'm getting at is that this game was probably the most important Amiga game ever made, which I consider to be a backhanded compliment.
We all float down here
The thing itself is a Puzzle game where some weird little guys drop out of a magical door onto a level and walk in a straight line until they bounce off a wall, fall off a cliff, or get killed by a hazard. The point of each level is to get a minimum number of lemmings to an exit door. You can assign a variety of roles to individual lemmings that cause them to interact with their environment in ways that overcome obstacles standing between them and the exit. The idea is that you're supposed to manage a line of the idiots in real time and in such a way that requires both puzzle solving and quick reflexes. In practice, this gameplay kinda sucks.
Being a computer game, the action is controlled by moving an on-screen cursor around with the d-pad, which I've talked about above. The view is zoomed all the way out, which makes it a crapshoot to select individual lemmings. That isn't a huge issue for the early levels, but it's exactly the kind of thing that will unravel the whole experience later on. The whole thing has a finicky feel to it, which isn't helped by the speed of the gameplay. This thing moves either too slowly or too quickly. When trying to get the cursor moved around and over a lemming that is marching to its doom, the lemmings move too fast to handle properly. Yet, once you have a route established, it can take a couple of minutes for all the little bastards to waddle their way to the exit. That last issue is big enough that a whole entire button on the three-button gamepad is devoted to fast-forwarding the gameplay.
You could spend a lifetime watching these idiots amble around
On top of all of this, the game is as ugly as you would expect from a budget Amiga game. The worst part for me is the sound, though. Most of the music tracks are bad midi versions of open license songs ranging from stuff like classical sonatas by Mozart or Chopin all the way to children's rhymes like "London Bridge Is Falling Down". The overall selection is bizarre, and the renditions here mostly made my ears bleed. On top of that, the little lemming noises are annoying. The whole thing looks and sounds like ass all the way around.
I made it to level 11 or something before quitting out of sheer aggravation. This isn't as bad an experience as Lemmings 3D, but few things are. The fact that one of the big games for the 3DO's launch window is a warmed-over Amiga game really bodes ill for this system.
Our third Humongous Point-and-Click Adventure of this batch is actually a port of the first game they ever released. Being the original game from this studio, and a year older than Fatty Bear, it's simpler and more straightforward. Though, also somehow more ambitious, for as much as that word could be used to describe these games.
You play as the titular putt-putt, who is a young child talking car that lives on his own pretty far out from the nearest town. The adult cars seem to know that he is living unsupervised at the edge of town and are cool with it. Like with the Chevron Cars or the movie Cars, we are better off not inquiring too deeply into the fictional universe of Putt-Putt. Anyway, there's going to be something called a 'Pet Parade' that Putt-Putt wants to join, but he needs to first acquire a pet and get signed up. This set-up gives the player three objectives: find a pet, get a balloon, and get a car wash.
It can't be an offensive Italian stereotype if it doesn't wildly gesticulate
Accomplishing those goals forces the players to learn that money can be exchanged for goods and services, because two coins are needed to get a car wash. There's a free coin in Putt-Putt's home, but the second needs to be earned by doing an odd job. The two options are mowing lawns and delivering groceries. I'm really fighting the urge to delve into why talking cars have lawns or need groceries. Anyhoo, each odd job nets exactly one coin, and they seem to be repeatable. Other than the car wash, you can get a new paintjob for three coins, so I guess this thing has a basically functional in-game economy. With the street urchin stank washed off him, Putt Putt can get a puppy from a cave and a balloon as a reward for helping a mama car find her lost kid. Not gonna unpack any of that. Finally, you go and get in the parade. That's it. There seems to be a bunch of optional crap that the player can futz around with, if so desired.
I was surprised that there are more screens, voice lines, and minigames in this thing than in Fatty Bear. Even though the graphics and interactability are comparatively primitive, this is still the more fully featured video game of the two. As far as educational value: there's counting to four, steps for brushing one’s teeth, steps in a car wash, waiting to cross a busy street, basic image recognition, and some simple logical deduction. Probably a good spread for the post-toddler, mostly illiterate demographic. This game also seems to have been something of a revelation in the edutainment space. It's hard to know for sure without deeper study, but this seems to have changed the entire thought process behind educational game design, to an extent that there is a pre- and post-Putt-Putt edutainment industry. As far as this being a launch window game for the 3DO, well, 16-bit systems surely couldn't have handled the raw power of Humongous Entertainment.
Gonna be upfront with you, I don't know what to make of this damn thing. This isn't so much a video game as it is a barely interactive storybook with a handful of facts about birds, clouds, and rainforests thrown in. Also, yes, this is that Shelley Duvall. It's hard to find information on whatever this is supposed to be, but I get the sense that it was a quick little project between Duvall and her long-time partner, Dan Gilroy.
So, Duvall was very active in children's programming in the late-80's and early-90's, which is what makes her involvement in early edutainment software make sense. According to the credits, she produced the game and did all the writing, so this wasn't just a licensing thing. As for her partner, Gilroy, he seems to have co-produced the game and created all of the music tracks. He was apparently a moderately successful musician in the 80's who seems to have been involved in getting Madonna's early career off the ground. I'll get back to the music in a couple of paragraphs. The developer they worked with was an also-ran multimedia studio whose only notable accomplishment was publishing a couple of the games in the Journeyman Project series. I don't know what to do with this information, so I'll leave it for your consideration.
I forget who's credited with the art, and I'm happy to be free of that burden
The CD itself contains a handful of encyclopedic entries about birds, a basic connect-the-dots game, character profiles, and the storybook itself. This is a barely animated and occasionally narrated children's book story about Shelley and Dan's menagerie of seven or so tropical birds going on an adventure after their house burns down. Each bird represents a different species and have their own fully voiced personalities, which I wish they didn't. It's kinda weird that Duvall would write a children's story where her house burns down or include a seemingly superfluous emphasis on her pet dog. The story raises further legal questions around whether any of those species of birds are in a protected category, which is the kinda question you don't want to raise when creating any kind of autobiographical material. Again, I don't know what to do with any of this.
Finally, there's the music. For reasons that should be obvious, the half-dozen or so music tracks are the most well produced things on this disc. They also give off the vibe of being produced in Gilroy's personal recording set-up on whatever topic he was thinking about at the time, and then handed off to the developers to somehow make fit. There's a real disconnect between the quality of the art, animation, and voice acting versus the music. No amount of description can do this bizarre nonsense any justice, so see it for yourselves below.
As far as I can find, It's a Bird's Life was only ever released on the 3DO, which is probably why it's so obscure. Finding forgotten, truly bizarre oddities like this thing is what keeps me going with this blog. Also, I streamed my experience with it, which is why I spent so much time here.
It doesn’t feel wholly applicable to rank most of these games, but the rules are the rules. Here's how this batch fits into the Ranking Of All 3DO Games:
1. Escape From Monster Manor
…
3. Putt-Putt Joins The Parade
4. Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise
6. Fatty Bear's Fun Pack
7. Shelley Duvall's It's A Bird's Life
9. Lemmings
…
10. Crime Patrol
This ranking list gets more cursed with each update.
Mirage Technologies was a small game developer founded in 1992, and it spent the 90's attempting to break out with a variety of original games across multiple genres. The most notable of these was the 1994 PC Fighting game, Rise of the Robots. It's notable because it was a trainwreck that got mercilessly lambasted in the games press. Even though no one asked for it, they made a sequel and released it in early '96. That game, Rise 2: Resurrection, has now become our problem.
The original Rise of the Robots featured a fighting engine that didn’t seem to borrow too much from the big 2D Fighting games of the time, Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. While this made the game stand out among other also-ran Fighters, the fighting engine Mirage did create stood out in all the wrong ways. As a result, that whole line of thinking was scrapped, and Rise 2 is just a bland Mortal Kombat knock-off.
No Comment
There are 18 robots in the initial roster with several more available as secrets or unlocks. That is a threefold increase in available characters from the first game, though this seems to have been accomplished by reusing most of the existing characters and applying some slight visual changes. I'm not sure if this is more or less heinous than having half-a-dozen color swapped ninjas, but the robots on offer weren't exactly memorable in the first place, and the size of this roster only muddies things further. The only stand-out aspect of this game's style are the truly stupid names for the characters. Cyborg and Loader from the original are now joined by their friends Prime-8, Necroborg, Lockjaw, Deadlift, Anil-8 and many more. Though, my favorite is Insane, who's like, totally insane, you guys. This is all very stupid and is the only tangible thing that I have taken away from the experience.
I suppose we need to get around to the fighting. Picture, if you will, Primal Rage. Replace the claymation monsters with uninteresting pre-rendered robots, make the controls feel even worse, and remove any remaining personality. You are now imagining Rise 2. Each character has a handful of combo attacks that feel inconsistent, and there is supposedly a fatality-like system called executions. I never saw any of those, so I have nothing else to say on the matter. Everything about this game looks, feels, and sounds bad. There's also supposed to be some kind of lore going on here, but it only exists outside of the game and is amazingly dull. There's nothing here to recommend for any reason; though, the AI is more functional than Criticom, so at least this isn't the worst fighting game we've seen.
It's an accomplishment to be both visually messy and basic
The difficulty settings are a bit odd, being represented on a 24-point scale from 0 to 23. As a general rule, you shouldn't let your programmer design the UI, that would be like letting your drummer handle the money. Anyway, I set it down to zero just to see what would happen. I went through the fight ladder and hit a wall at the seventh fight. I don't know how high the ladder geso, and I was afraid there would 18 matches or something equally dumb, so I quit out. Before leaving, I bumped the difficulty up to the default, 12, and tried the ladder again. I got wrecked on the second fight that time, so at least the difficulty settings do something. I had no reason to keep poking at this wretched corpse of a thing, and there is equally no reason to dwell on it any further.
It's kind of wild that there were two different Basketball games released for the PS1 at the same time this early into the console's lifecycle. I'm not sure why things lined up this way, but here we are. Going alphabetically, we're going to look at EA's version first. While most people reading this would be more familiar with the NBA Live series bumblefucking itself out of existence In the 2010's, in the mid-90's it was still a bouncing baby sports franchise with its whole life ahead of it. The history behind this thing is a little interesting. It looks like EA started making basketball games in '89 based on the yearly NBA playoffs. Technology didn't advance far enough for EA to fit every NBA team onto a single cart until '93 with NBA Showdown. The whole thing was rebranded to NBA Live the next year and we're now looking at the second one of those. All of this is to say that EA wasn't new to this genre, which is demonstrated in the product itself.
Getting this out in the open before going further, this was the most fun I have had with a sports game thus far. This is for one very specific reason, that we'll get to later, which has a minimal impact on the objective quality of the overall package. Starting out, the opening cutscene is pretty good for a sports game, with the footage and CG interspersed and decently synced to the music. It's a small thing, but a competent opening is a strong indicator of quality. Further, this is the first game where the menus really felt like proper late-90's UI. Menus of that time are clunky and obsolete by our standards, but it's a sight better than the intergenerational crap we've waded through so far. Past that, there are the expected single session, season, and tournament modes. The settings are also somewhat robust, with multiple difficulties and options to adjust the realism of the experience. Of course, I set it to easy and went full arcade mode.
Behold, the VIRTUAL STADIUM™!
The last thing to note about the game options is that this thing has a cheeky two-player setup, where in the season mode you can have either controller play either side of a match. If you have two people, you can switch around who plays what team in a season, or in single player you can play against your selected team. That means you could spend an entire season griefing a team you don't like and drive them down to zero wins, which is incredibly silly. Anyway, getting into the gameplay, we have finally encountered out first 5v5 Basketball game, the future has truly arrived. This has the expected side effect of making the game visually busy almost to the point of incomprehensibility. The player selector usually does a good job of keeping both the player you're controlling and the current owner of the ball obvious and the playfield readable. That's a small thing, but it goes a hell of a long way to making the game playable.
The controls feel normal enough. There's the standard passing, shooting, player changing, and sprinting options that you would expect. Additionally, when playing on the defense with penalties turned off, the steal button will cause your guy to shove opposing players onto their faces. There's something about the thud or the sprite animation, but every time I knocked someone on their ass, I began giggling uncontrollably. What if basketball was like hockey and everyone just went around punching each other in the face? It's hilarious. I played two games into the season and won both. While doing so, I ended up literally beating the crap out of the Utah Jazz. In fact, from now on I'm going to judge Basketball games by how much I can physically bully the Jazz.
Oh look, I can see what's going on *glares murderously at NBA Shootout* *FIFA 96 backs slowly out of the room*
I shouldn't close this out without bringing up the graphics. The players are sprite-based, the court looks mediocre, and the crowds look bad. The gameplay is visually unimpressive for the era, but I personally like sprites over primitive polygons, though I imagine that opinion is a privilege of living in modern times. Otherwise, the sound design works well enough and the reactive variety of lower thirds showing various stats throughout the game is a nice touch. While this is technically far less impressive than NBA ShootOut, that matters far less from a future perspective than raw fun value. Speaking of which…
We now arrive at the first entry in Sony's Basketball franchise. This came from the same effort that produced NFL GameDay and NHL FaceOff. I've just now noticed the naming convention while writing this… Back on track, the overall package here is incredibly similar to NBA Live 96. To the point where it's easier to talk about this thing in terms of how it differs from that other game.
Along those lines, I was immediately disconcerted by the truncated opening movie. Remember, that's a warning sign. The menu UI is much cleaner and more responsive than Live, but not quite as informative. The same basic modes and options are on offer in both games, so that's a draw. Getting into the gameplay, we run into the main points both for and against this thing. What we have here is the first Basketball game that is both fully polygonal and fully rostered. Graphically, this was the best-looking sports game at its time of release. So much so that most of the coverage at the time seems to have focused on that point, and all evaluations of the game revolved around how much weight the individual reviewers put on technical achievement. The second point, and the most important one in hindsight, is that NBA ShootOut plays like ass.
You have 0.5 seconds to figure out who has the ball
Part of the problem stems from the aforementioned polygonal graphics. Because the players are three-dimensional objects with collision inhabiting a three-dimensional space, the traditional way of moving players around doesn't work. In a sprite-based game, you can easily move players around other players, and the design around how the 2D hitboxes interact had been well figured out by this time, as can be seen in Live. Managing 3D hitboxes in an isometric playfield requires different considerations, and London Studio didn't fully figure it out on this first attempt. This practically makes the defensive AI so much stronger here than in any other game in this genre, which wreaks havoc on the game balance. Additionally, the player acceleration feels off, the controls for passing work poorly, The UI does a bad job of keeping the playfield legible, and ball stealing is a bit wonky. To cap this off, the arcade play mode has more simulation elements than Live, which is a real bummer for someone who doesn't know jack about basketball.
Oh, and the free throw minigame is completely borked
I played one match in the season mode and was ready to quit out of sheer aggravation by halftime, though I forced myself through to the end out of self-flagellation more than anything else. A shockingly miserable experience for something that has otherwise high production values. From what I've found, this game didn't sell that well in North America and was mainly intended for European consumption. Sony should have kept the damn thing in Europe. Feel free to cancel me for American chauvinism, but I don't trust Basketball games developed in countries that don't have a NBA team.
Speaking of getting cancelled, let's talk about Nazis. If I'm already getting myself into trouble for anti-British sentiments, I might as well trigger another group by outing myself as one of those antifa supersoldiers that Tucker gets all hot and bothered about. To make this clear: Nazis are bad, and glorifications of the Wehrmacht specifically or the Nazi war machine generally are also bad. Now that I've alienated half of the internet gaming community, let's alienate the other half by looking at Wargaming. Or maybe it's the same half…whatever.
I poked around the edges of Wargaming in my denunciation of the Hydlide franchise, and really digging into it will take way too long for our purposes here. As such, I will only note that Wargaming made its way onto PCs at around the same time as RPGs in the early-80's. In fact, this developer, Strategic Simulations Inc., holds the claim of publishing the first computer Wargame, Computer Bismarck, in 1980. SSI would become the main instigator of the PC Strategy genre throughout the 80's, and they also seem to have made a buttload of AD&D games as a side hustle. By the time the original Panzer General came out in '94 they were on their last legs and got bought by Mindscape later the same year. Funnily enough, Panzer General was also their best-selling game of all time. The reason for that gets into the whole thing with this game and the Wargaming genre.
something something Clean Wehrmacht Myth
Before this point, computer Wargames held a well-earned reputation for being completely impenetrable. Little effort was put into useability or comprehensibility for anyone that was not already familiar with wargame rulesets. In other words, it was all complete grognard shit. At some point in the early-90's the designers at SSI got their hands on some Japanese console Strategy games, supposedly from the Daisenryaku franchise, and came up with the idea to simplify their own games. This became a major deal through demonstrating user friendly UI, streamlined gameplay, and easier-to-read graphics. As the story goes, this set off the creation of modern western Strategy game design. So, how does this revolutionary game actually play? It feels like a boring Fire Emblem game.
The game experience is the least interesting aspect of this thing. This is a standard Turn Based Strategy game with 39 maps, most of which are based on historical battles, but with a few fanciful scenarios thrown in for giggles. Each of these scenarios is laid on hex grids of various sizes, with 2D units taking up the individual spaces. There is a very wide variety of unit types, including various infantry, artillery, armor, air, and sea units. Each unit has a health value that starts out at 10 and ticks down as it takes damage. There's a kind of loose weapon triangle going on, with various terrain and placement modifiers thrown in. Units seem to represent battalion sized elements, so this is firmly in Grand Strategy territory. Each scenario has some kind of objective, usually the capture of some number of cities, and a strict turn limit. There are some balance issues, such as artillery having a movement limit of one space, with not enough turns to bring it anywhere useful in offensive terms. It's very hard for me to contain my apathy for the gameplay in this thing.
The action really bogs down on the larger maps
Graphically, this game is extremely primitive by the standards of 1996. The maps and sprites are basic in the way that a mid-generation SNES game would look basic, and the sound design is equally iffy. The maps can get real big and fit more units than a 16-bit system could have handled, but this further hinders the experience because we're playing this game on a controller. I bet you forgot I was talking about the PS1 version this whole time. There is noticeable lag when moving units or loading attack animations, and the controls feel bad, as always with PC ports. This also makes the menus clunky to navigate. The overall experience feels incredibly slow and monotonous. In my 50 minutes playing this game I got through maybe 12 turns across two scenarios. This is a noticeably lesser experience to contemporary Japanese console strategy games, one of which we'll look at next week. I'm probably being a bit unfair, but it's impossible for me to go from playing something like Hearts of Iron IV to this thing, experiencing the incredible decrease in everything, and separate myself from my modern context.
pew pew kablooey
This brings us back around to the subject matter. As much as I reflexively want to throw feces at wehraboos, there are some extenuating circumstances to consider here. First and less importantly, this was the 90's and the early History Channel had dads across America hooked on that WWII stuff, especially the borderline fetishistic fascination with fascist militaries. Second and most importantly, wargaming culture traditionally tried to take a step back from political considerations when playing an individual wargame. If someone showed up with a WWII game set, someone was going to play the Nazis regardless of personal feelings. Accordingly, there is a bit of distance taken from the historical source material when rolling dice and fiddling with little figurines. That kind of thinking would make grognards take something like Panzer General without thinking too much about the moral or political implications. Though, those attitudes have, for decades, caused a certain permissiveness towards actual neo-Nazis using the medium to act out their own SS fantasies. But that's getting into a different topic entirely and I need to wrap this post up.
Not every batch of games can be super notable, and it took a lot for me to wring this many words out of this week's gaming refuse. Things should pick up eventually. Let's rank these things in the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get outta here.
It's been a whole entire month without a Soccer game, and the universe just could not let that stand in the 90's. So here we are again, playing with balls. This time we're getting Rage Software's interpretation of the sport, which seemed to have been one of the main series for this stuff in PAL regions at the time. Striker '96 looks to be the fourth or fifth Soccer game developed by Rage since '92, when the original Striker came out on the Amiga. Now that I'm thinking about it, those Amiga roots make sense.
There's no licensing of any kind in this game, so you get to choose between a healthy assortment of national teams with fictional players. You have the standard single game and tournament modes that we all expect at this point, though the game options are robust yet straightforward, which is always nice. The production values are lacking in comparison to the games we've seen from the big publishers, and there is a budget vibe around the whole package. It looks mediocre, sounds mediocre, and has limited commentary lines.
Graphic Design is my passion
The actual gameplay is where it gets a bit weird. Not only does this thing use a down-field camera angle, but it also moves too fast. I wouldn't have imagined calling a Soccer game too fast, but there's something uncanny about seeing soccer players go from one end of the field to the other in the same time as players in a hockey game. The upside is that the game maintains a snappy pace that prevents things from getting boring. The controls are simple compared to something like Goal Storm, with only the standard passing and shooting options. The main mechanical gimmick offered by this game is the variable shot power. What I mean is, whenever you kick the ball to either pass or shoot, a power meter pops up onscreen. You hold whichever button you're using to fill up that bar. In theory this would let you adjust how far or fast you're kicking the ball, though it doesn't work that well in practice.
The experience is hampered by a couple design decisions. First, Rage somehow made stealing the ball too easy. This is the opposite problem as other Soccer games, but here we are. All you need to do to steal the ball is to run into the player that currently has it. This works both ways, leading to situations where the AI and I repeatedly traded control of the ball back and forth in quick succession. These situations are disorienting clusterfucks, which tend to walk the line between funny and frustrating. Second, passing is incredibly imprecise. Passing the ball causes it to go flying vaguely towards the nearest teammate vaguely in the direction you're facing. The shot power mechanic interacts with this in a way that turns the whole exercise into a crapshoot. I eventually found that passing was only worth it when yeeting the ball all the way across the field, otherwise direct hand-offs are the only safe way to move the ball between players.
Oh look, I can tell what's going on *continues glaring at FIFA 96*
The mixed bag of the game mechanics isn’t helped by the quality of the AI. Depending on whether the difficulty is set to easy or normal, the CPU team is either dumber than a sack of bricks or murderously omnipresent. The whole experience is uneven, but in the end I wound up having some fun with it. I started off trying to play a match on normal and got thoroughly destroyed. After I set the game to easy, I won my second match after burning through overtime and going to the very dumb goal kicking minigame; I finally wrecked my opponent in the third match. This seems like a game where the exploits could be sussed out in a couple of hours and then turned into a mindless toy afterwards. Even with all the problems, this is probably the second-best Soccer game I've played so far, which says more about the genre than anything else.
Man, there have been an absurd number of Alien games over the years, and only like two of them are any good. Those two games are 2014's Alien: Isolation, which is obvious, and 2011's Aliens: Infestation, which I shall tolerate no slander against. As for the rest of the games, I can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Alien Trilogy is one of them. Actually, that's probably underselling the weird place this game occupies in the franchise.
What we have here is a Horror FPS that attempted to join the esteemed gaggle of Shooters that occupied the limited niche of games which built off the standard of Doom II in the two years before Quake came along and reinvented everything. That group includes games like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3D, and the first two Marathon games among others. For a variety of reasons, Alien Trilogy does not rate inclusion, with the main reason being that it's bad.
Can't...see...SHIT
You play as a space marine reimagining of Ellen Ripley, who is tasked with single-handedly clearing out the infested colony from Aliens. In fact, this game has nothing to do with either Alien or Alien 3, which should qualify it for a Truth In Advertising complaint or something. You slowly make your way through 20 or so levels that mostly sort of evoke the visual style of the movie. You gradually collect a half dozen weapons across the levels and fight off facehuggers, xenomorphs, and zombified marines for some reason. There are also three Xenomorph Queen boss fights throughout the game, because I guess the designers at Probe ran out of ideas. The levels themselves can have a few types of objectives and showcase functional but dull design. I'm struggling to find nice things to say. Oh, the opening cutscene is well done by the standards of the time. That's all I got.
Oh, hi there
The first problem any player will encounter is that the levels are too dark for their own good. There's atmosphere and then there's not being able to see jack shit, with this game decidedly erring towards the latter. The second thing you'll notice is that the combat massively sucks. I could just say that the shooting feels bad, but that's too vague. The terrible feel is due to a confluence of three gameplay flaws. The first one should be obvious: the movement is sluggish and cumbersome. Turning is too slow and the lateral and backwards movement is leisurely, which does not complement the zigzagging tomfoolery of the AI. This is exacerbated by the shooting itself feeling inaccurate. There's no reticule like in a modern FPS, so you shoot in the direction of enemies and hope for the best. Most or all of the Shooters from this era work this way with generous aim assistance to compensate, but not here. The basic semi-automatic pistol seems to put bullets all over the place, which makes hitting small targets like the facehuggers a pain in the ass. The cherry on top of all this is that the xenomorphs and zombie humans are bullet sponges. Even on the easy difficulty, it can take up to 50 pistol rounds or 20 shotgun rounds to kill a single alien. Some of that is from inaccuracy, but they also absorb most of those hits. In the end, the combat boils down to not being able to see what you're shooting at, if you see it you can't hit it, and if you can hit it nothing happens. This isn't fun, and it turns the otherwise short levels into annoying slogs.
Just an affectionate little fella
I made it halfway through the fourth level before being attrited to death, and I didn't feel like loading my save. The fact that I made it about 1/5th of the way through the game in 20 minutes doesn't bode well for the overall value of the package. There are also a ton of additional quibbles I can harp on. Most health packs only restore a single health point, which is hilariously insulting. The crappy xenomorph sprites are supposed to have motion captured animation, which is not at all noticeable. The automap is absolutely critical to the gameplay, but it's only available in a pause menu instead of an overlay. Then there's the whole discussion that can be had about how the xenomorphs function basically the same as Doom's Pinky Demons, which entirely misses the point from the movies. Actually, everything about this game completely misses every theme from the source material, which is kind of an accomplishment.
I want to write Alien Trilogy off and laugh at the contemporary reviewers who gave it high scores. Yet, somehow, this thing was probably the best Alien game made to-date, which is kinda sad. The presence of any kind of stylistic atmosphere and a visual design reminiscent of Aliens was enough for people at the time. When we additionally consider the fact that Alien: Resurrection would come out the next year, this game isn't even the worst thing to happen to this franchise in the late-90's.
Have we finally reached peak FMV? God, I hope so. I know that this era of FMV dies out after '98, but when did it reach its zenith? I can see an argument for this game being the inflection point. Or, I guess I should say "game", because Psychic Detective is an Interactive Movie that is only technically interactive.
It's difficult to untangle everything going on in this game from its breakneck, incoherent pacing. The major scenes are inherently intersected by and interspersed with bizarre distortions, abrupt perspective shifts, flashbacks, red herrings, and barely intelligible audio that makes the experience feel like a haphazard fever dream. Yet, digging through the nonsense, what you end up with is a live action Choose Your Own Adventure novel. The story plays out regardless of what you do, leading to 14 possible endpoints. This is another run-based game in a similar vein as Tom Zito's shenanigans, where you need to play multiple times in order to see different video clips and eventually piece together what you're supposed to do. Each run can take anywhere from 30 - 45 minutes, and it's probably supposed to take somewhere between 3 and 10 runs to get the true ending.
Sure
You play as some asshole named Eric, who has the psychic ability to touch an object and see flashbacks related to it. The game begins with him meeting a young woman, Laina, who is probably supposed to be Russian, and learning that he can also mind jump into other people's minds and see through their eyes. She needs him to use all his abilities to help her solve her father's murder, and he agrees to help because he thinks she's pretty or something. The motivations of any of the characters are hard to parse. The first major scene takes place at the father's wake, from which the story could branch off to a handful of different scenes before usually ending at the nondescript offices of a self-help cult. There are a dozen or so named characters who all have something going on, and it takes multiple playthroughs to figure out what's up with any of them.
As far as I was able to tell from my one playthrough, the plot revolves around Laina's ex-KGB father's mad science experiments with psychic powers. Those experiments were too successful, leading him to get murdered by a guy named Max, who wants to use his psychic powers for world domination. There are four cylindrical McGuffins that Max needs, and Eric has to eventually confront him in a psychic duel for the fate of the world or something. There's some stuff about Laina and her sister, the weird old grandmother who is the only person that knows everything, some KGB guy, and Max's murder-happy henchwoman. I dunno. In my playthrough, Eric was arrested because a Sergei guy got murdered by some random goons. He spent his five minutes in jail reflecting on his own psychosexual hangups, which I didn't need in my life.
The interface
The interactive sections of the game are played with the footage in a small central window with options to see other clips popping up around the edges. The main footage keeps going, even when you select other clips to see, and the options to see those clips are time sensitive, sometimes lasting only a couple of seconds. There are a few places where you get to make a choice that branches the path, but usually you're choosing between multiple mutually exclusive film clips to view. You need to replay the game to see different options, and no one playthrough will let you see enough to have the story make any sense. Across multiple runs, there may be a worthwhile narrative to piece together, but this game inherently puts a wrong foot forward at the start and creates the worst first impression for itself. It doesn't give a good reason to invest the time and effort that it demands.
Ugh
This isn't even touching the bizarre board game that serves as the final boss. That thing definitely takes multiple playthroughs to figure out and serves as a hard wall for anyone playing this thing. You can probably figure it out well enough using save states, but players in '96 didn't have that luxury. Speaking of, reviewers at the time seem to have been mixed on this thing. It was too weird and incoherent for most people, but everyone seemed impressed with its handling of mature themes. I reluctantly agree with that sentiment. There are sexual aspects to the story that could have easily turned into softcore smut, but the game seems to be able to keep itself out of the gutter. That would have been an achievement in the mid-90's, since it seems like games back then were either asexual or juvenile with no in-between. Though, we can't judge too much, as that dynamic didn't really change until the 2010's.
Regardless, this thing baffled the hell out of me, and I miserably failed the final boss fight, resulting in what is probably the most common bad ending. It should go without saying that the dialogue and acting are bad, and the audio and video quality are trashed by compression. Even then, I was mildly impressed by the number of actors and locations used in this thing, making it feel more produced than most other FMV games.
It was bound to happen at some point. I made it 119 games into this project before reaching my first wholesale write-off. I was unable to play this game. I made it to the first input screen and the game rejected everything I tried to do. I gave it about a dozen tries to get the game to accept any of my inputs before I gave up and walked away.
Brain Dead 13 is an Interactive Movie in the tradition of Dragon's Lair, but without Don Bluth's involvement. This means that the gameplay consists of watching animated video clips and pressing the correct button input at the correct time, in a proto-Quick Time Event kind of way. Being the final iteration of this sub-genre, there’s frequent checkpointing, infinite continues, and an open-ended structure that tries to give a sense of physical continuity between locations. Yet, I can only guess at the quality of the end product, because I get to the first screen and hit a wall. You start in the intersection of a hallway and can press any of the directional buttons to move to a different scene. If you don't press a button, you get killed after like five seconds. Dying there forces you to rewatch the roughly one-minute cutscene that plays beforehand, and I couldn't take it anymore after the first dozen or so viewings. There's an audio cue that tells you whether or not you hit the correct button, and I always got the negative cue no matter what I pressed. There might be something wrong with the emulation or my control settings, I don’t know. The upshot is that I did not see enough of this thing to pass any kind of judgement on it.
Only screen I reached
This is all highly demoralizing, but this game came out on everything that had a CD drive back in the day, so there will be ample opportunities to try again. I'm calling a mulligan on this one, and it probably sucks anyway, so no big loss.
The first quarter dumping ground continues to inflict immense harm on all who view it, but the end is in sight. Surely things aren't going to get worse from here-- THAT'S IT, I'M GETTING RID OF THIS CURSED MONKEY PAW. Anyway, the Ranking of All PS1 Games demands attention.
Of course this is a fucking Amiga game. Not only that, but this is also an Amiga game from 1988, which I think is the oldest lineage we've yet to see on a fifth gen console. This was one of Interplay's first games as an independent publisher, and somehow produced by Brian Fargo. What an oddly significant game this is, for how little it has going on.
Battle Chess is a Chess game. You start it up and play chess. There aren't a ton of game options or specific rulesets like in the Chessmaster series, it's just chess. The main gimmick is that the game is rendered in sprite-based 3D, which would have been impressive back in '88. Each of the pieces are given a medieval fantasy makeover, and they have their own unique animations. What would have been the most impressive in the 80's are the detailed animations that play when pieces are captured, or in this case killed. There is an animation for each combination of attacking and defending piece…precisely one animation. When a knight takes a knight, there's a different fight scene than when a knight takes a pawn or anything else. Yet, because it's just the one fight scene, you're going to see that every time knight takes knight.
This camera angle sucks so bad
Digging a bit further into these animations because the game has almost nothing else going for it, they tend to take a while. When a piece moves, they casually saunter over to their new space. If a piece moves to an enemy space, the two pieces slowly walk to get lined up for the battle animation, which itself is liable to take like half a minute. Between that and the small delay every time the game has to load into or out of any animation, the whole thing winds-up with a leisurely pace. That ain't my speed, in part because the audio/visual experience is kinda boring and I'm not a fan of chess.
It's utterly insane to think that this was one of the first dozen or so games for the 3DO. This would have been nifty during the transition to 16-bit computing, but not on a 90’s 32-bit console. The sensibilities don't even match up. The watered-down references to Monty Python and Indiana Jones are kinda lame in a way that evokes the old-style pocket protector kind of nerd, which very well could have been the original target audience for an Amiga Chess game. This thing smells dusty and musty, like a computer room that hasn't been cleaned out since the early 90's.
American Laser Games, like Digital Pictures, only existed in the early 90's as part of the heyday of multimedia gaming. While Tom Zito and friends were going for weird Interactive Movies on consoles, this company was entirely specialized in making FMV Light Gun games on LaserDiscs for arcade consumption. You read that right, LaserDiscs. What a time to be alive. Anyway, they started with Mad Dog McCree in 1990 and went from there. From all of that, it should be no surprise that Crime Patrol was originally released in arcades in early '93 before being ported to the new-fangled 3DO.
So, this is a LaserDisc game compressed down onto a CD that is designed to be used with an honest-to-goodness light gun. That last point is where we run into trouble with emulating the thing decades after the fact; my PC isn't set-up with any kind of light gun. The game can be played with a gamepad, but the reticle movement is way too sluggish to reasonably expect a person to get it around the screen. This is tipped over into unplayable by the need to aim the reticule at the bottom corner of the screen to reload. Making the player drag the reticule away from the action to reload leaves no time whatsoever to aim at enemies. This is made worse by the one-hit-kill nature of the game. You would need to completely memorize each level in order to last more than a minute.
Those TVs ain't worth dying over
That inability to get literally anywhere with this thing led me to mess around with trying to emulate the 3DO mouse and light gun accessories using my own mouse. The calibration for those were so hilariously off, by as much as half a screen, that they actually made the game more unplayable. The impossibility of the task at hand was made very clear very quickly, so I bounced.
If I had been able play this game, I would have found a pre-Virtua Cop kind of Light Gun game using all live action footage. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the production values and performances are subpar, and the CD-quality video compression doesn't help. The premise is that you play as a cop, starting as a rookie and working your way up to military special forces for some reason. This progression is broken out into ranks, with each rank containing three levels that you can play in any order. The scale and severity of the criminals that you gun down scales up as the game progresses, with a different character ordering you around at each of the tiers. There might be 12 or 13 levels in total, plus a shooting range for practice. That's an adequate amount of content for one of these kinds of games, assuming you can play the damn thing.
Pointing guns at civilians is both cool and appropriate
Before moving on, I need to climb onto my soapbox for a minute. Crime Patrol is one of the most psychotic glorifications of police violence that I have seen. It portrays the job of a modern police officer as entirely consisting of gunning down dozens of thugs at a time in low-context gun battles. In the starting set of levels, you're called out to situations like a robbery and what seems like a fucking noise complaint, only to single-handedly take out scores of gleeful murderers. This game even has a whole fake-surrender gimmick. When looking at this shit, everyone reading this should find it chilling that the developers at American Laser Games had previously specialized in police training software before going into video games. There is a sense of this being a fantasy of what cops wanted to see themselves doing, which goes a long way to explain policing in the US. Technically, artistically, and politically, this game is accursed garbage.
One last point. You could make the argument that the developers were just taking the gameplay from Mad Dog McCree and applying it to a modern setting and that I should chill out. I would say that applying the myth of the Old West lawman to modern policing is what culturally fostered the inappropriate use of police violence that we're living with to this day. That's what makes shit like this so actively bad. You have a genre of games that in the 80's traded on engrained stereotypes of Wild West and Mobster violence, and you recontextualize that violence to modern randos robbing a Best Buy. Game players who had been inculcated with the idea that bandits and wiseguys should be gunned down with impunity (which is already problematic) then have that logic applied to contemporary crime. Having the progression in the game go from street crime all the up to guys who are smuggling WMDs or some shit only further reinforces to the player that common criminals are in the category of bad guys to be gunned down. Crime Patrol was by no means the only piece of media, past or present, to get up to this bullshit, but every small piece of the overall problem needs to be called out as such.
Scratch what I said earlier about Battle Chess. This has to be the oldest standalone release we're going to see on any fifth gen console, originally being released for arcades in the year of our lord Nineteen-Hundred and Eighty-Three. Dragon's Lair had existed for ten years before this port was released. That isn't saying too much in this day and age; as of writing, Grand Theft Auto V is still being sold and played ten years and two console generations after its launch. Yet, ten years now aren't like ten years back in the day. There were only ten years separating Pitfall from Sonic The Hedgehog 2, or Dragon Quest from Chrono Cross. That's why it's insane that one of the earliest 3DO games is something that came out alongside the original Mario Bro.’s.
Though, being a LaserDisc game, it wasn't really possible to accurately port this thing to consoles until this moment in time. Even then, being the first Interactive Movie, this is inherently less sophisticated than later games in the genre, which were readily available in '93. Zito and associates had already taken the ideas from Dragon's Lair in deeper and more involved directions by now. So, this release would have been little more than a minor curiosity in the scheme of things.
There's a whole separate conversation to be had about Don Bluth animation
Really, the story around this game is much more interesting than the thing itself. It follows an intentionally cliché premise of a knight going through a castle to save a princess from a dragon, with some comedic allowances. There seems to be only 30-something minutes of animation total, and a successful run takes less than 15 minutes. The gameplay consists of watching short, animated clips and pressing the correct input at the correct moment of the clip to successfully move on. In other words, this is the first Quick Time Event game. As such, the input timing is completely fucked. This is made worse by having even one failed input result in player death, restarting you at either the current or previous clip. You get five lives per continue, so you really need to know what you’re doing.
I was inspired to do a little bit of math around this game. There are 26 unique scenes total, including the fixed first two scenes and the fixed final scene. All the intermediate scenes are randomized in each playthrough and can be repeated from two to four times. It looks like there are a total of about 40 scenes in a successful playthrough, which seems to average at around 12 minutes. The number of inputs per scene, which could either be Up, Down, Left, Right, or Action (B on the 3DO), can range from 2 to about 12. So, that leads to 100-something inputs in 700-something seconds of gameplay. I like round numbers, so let's say 150 inputs in 750 seconds for a playthrough. That averages to an input every 5 seconds, including load times and transitions. To beat this game, you need to be able to correctly perform a QTE every 5 or so seconds for 12 minutes straight. Now, keep in mind that the timing for these inputs is both highly demanding AND that in the early versions of this game there are no onscreen prompts for what you're supposed to do.
This is as far as I made it
That was all a long-winded way to say that the play experience is completely fucked and I only made it four scenes into this thing. I need to also point out that this release of Dragon's Lair has no menus of any kind, you press start and jump right in. The upshot is that you absolutely need to have the game manual to get anywhere with this thing, which I figured out like two minutes into playing it. Funnily enough, the most easily accessible scan of the 3DO manual includes a hand-written note for an infinite lives code. Even using that, I never made it past the Snake Ceiling scene because that first Right input wouldn't work for me, no matter when I pushed the button.
This version of this game is largely unplayable, which is a shame. There's a lot that can be dug into and discussed regarding this thing. The opportunities and constraints of the LaserDisc format in the 80's, the career of Don Bluth and his place in animation history, and the design/portrayal of Daphne as an intersection of psychosexual manipulation and coin-op design are all interesting topics which have nothing to do with the 3DO. As such, we'll move on and leave that for other times and places.
Remember when I claimed that the 3DO Company didn't put out any first-party games in 1993? I lied…Or did I? Never forget that there is no truth regarding this system. Regardless, what we got here is a horror-themed FPS that probably coincided with the release of Doom. That's right, this isn't a Doom Clone, it's a Wolfenstein Clone!
Because this is a hastily thrown together FPS in the very early days of the genre, there's one gun, limited enemy types, and very basic maze design. And that's what the levels are: mazes. There's only a thin pretense of a plot, where you must fight your way through a haunted house in order to collect pieces of a magical talisman for reasons. You start in the attic, have only a single zap gun, and loads of spookies to shoot. You collect interchangeable keys to open doors and pick up ammo, health, and treasure for scoring. The entirety of the game is wandering through twisting hallways and rooms to find a McGuffin and exit in each level. Most enemies go down in one shot, though the hitboxes are weird and finicky. From what I saw, every level has a mini-boss guarding the exit, which is just an up-healthed regular enemy.
There sure are a lot of these idiots
The experience was tedious enough that I had the attention span to home in on small specifics of the experience. For example, the zappy pistol holds exactly twenty shots, even though this is obfuscated by presenting it as an energy bar instead of a counter. Each ammo pickup gives you five shots. This led to me to eventually counting my shots and doing the math before entering new rooms. Health is also obfuscated, with no onscreen HUD; the character's arm gets ripped up as you take damage. There is a basic menu you can open that will give you character and inventory information, but you gotta make a point to stop and look at it. The enemy AI doesn't add much to this experience, being about as simple as you would imagine while also mostly using melee attacks. The only difficulty comes from the awkward controls. While the walking is quick and responsive, the turning is painfully slow, which makes it easy for enemies to get a swipe in during the frequent 90-degree turns you have to make. Though, to the credit of the developers, they figured out the utility of using the shoulder buttons to strafe, which would become the standard for first-person console games until Halo. Ultimately, the sum of this experience is quite boring, and I only made it to the third level before stopping.
Any interest garnered by this thing comes from the aesthetics. The game leans heavily into the haunted house setting. Other than the horror creatures that you shoot, there are random ghosts that pop up to say boo, randomly placed haunted furniture, and a soundtrack that frequently swerves into the demented. Let's dwell on that soundtrack a bit. The tracks tend to throw in spoken lines and random screaming or growling. This can be mildly obnoxious, as it takes a while to learn to differentiate those clips from legitimate sound effects. Good game music doesn't distract from important audio cues in the gameplay, and it seems like people hadn't fully thought that through in the early days of CD gaming. Still, the music is notable in its own right for being so over-the-top and bizarre. I personally recommend the "Long Title" track, which first shows up in the third level, for being insane and "Haunt Hop Two" for being a genuine jam.
2Spooky4Me
If you couldn't tell, I don't take the frights in this game all that seriously. It's the digital equivalent of someone sticking your hand in a bowl of cold pasta and telling you it's intestines. Yet, as much as I want to point and laugh, this thing is kind of an achievement for its time. Wolfenstein 3D came out in '92 and Alone in the Dark came out in North America in early '93. The developers of this game were able to put those two concepts together in almost record time. Not only that, but this could be seen as the first console FPS ever released, whether it's first or second depends on your opinions about Faceball 2000. That all would be notable if it weren't for the fact that Doom came out either at or close to the same time as Escape From Monster Manor. In that comparison, this game is a complete joke in every way possible and it seems to have been treated that way by contemporary reviewers.
The scariest part is that this failure of a thing is the best 3DO game I've played so far.
Well, this batch of games was cursed in every way possible. It's hard to imagine things getting worse from he- WHY DOES THAT MONKEY PAW KEEP CURLING ITS FINGERS?!? Oh well, to accompany the launch of this ill-fated series, I am doomed to announce the beginning of the worst thing I'm ever going to make, The Ranking Of All 3DO Games. With five games in the bag, we can start it off with the following:
1. Escape From Monster Manor
2. Battle Chess
3. Crash n' Burn
4. Dragon's Lair
5. Crime Patrol
Ranking those games made me physically ill. Let's get outta here.
IF I DON'T WRITE ABOUT FATTY BEAR, THAN WHO WILL? HUH? YOU? THAT'S RIGHT. THIS IS THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE LATEST COMMENTARY ON FATTY BEAR AND HIS BOY PUTT-PUTT. YOU'RE GOING TO READ THE NEXT ENTRY, OR I SWEAR TO GOD I'LL TURN THIS BLOG AROUND.
YES, I KNOW GOING IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER WAS A MISTAKE. WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES SOMETIMES.
Time to Taking An Uppercut To The Face: 40 Minutes
We have now arrived at our first proper Street Fighter game, though the release timing is a bit odd. Not being a fighting game guy, I had to do a bit of research to figure out where Street Fighter Alpha fits into things. It seems that after Capcom had milked Street Fighter II for all it was worth, they decided to make a prequel/soft reboot of the franchise instead of going straight to a third numbered entry. They used this opportunity to switch up the roster and make some changes to the fighting system. The mechanical significance of all this goes a bit over my head, but we'll get to that.
As is now customary, the first thing I did on boot-up was go into the settings and set the difficulty down to the lowest level. The best thing I can say about this game is the inclusion of a rudimentary practice mode, which would have been super useful if I wanted to spend the time learning proper button execution. After spending ten minutes failing to throw a consistent Hadouken, I backed out of that and looked at the fight ladder. I chose a random character, Charlie, and went through the eight fights. The easy difficulty is actually pretty easy in this game and I was able to beat Bison with minimal difficulty. There wasn't really an ending, which was probably a function of the difficulty level, but that's to be expected in the mid-90's. I upped the difficulty to 3/8 and tried the ladder again as Chun-li with the turbo on. I made it to round five and got wrecked by Sagat. This is a ho-hum recounting of my playthrough, because this game is overall is a ho-hum experience.
I was gonna make a joke until just now when I noticed their feet
I feel awkward about my apathetic attitude towards this game. For what this was supposed to be in its time, it should feel like a big deal, but it doesn't. It looks nice, the animations are snappy, it runs smoothly, and the music is good. That might be part of the problem. The presentation is only just fine. A mid-tier game like Dark Legend looks and sounds about as good as this game, which is an unflattering comparison considering that this is supposed to be the biggest deal in its genre. The only unequivocally positive thing I can say is that I always enjoyed the Z transition into each match, it's just really satisfying.
Maybe another reason for my indifferent attitude is the roster. Capcom pared down the cast from the last version of Street Fighter II, which I think had 17 characters, down to 10 initial and 3 boss characters. The issue with this is that only 6 of those 13 are carryovers. People were attached enough to the roster from SFII that someone felt the need to shoehorn all of them into the 1994 movie. It feels weird and wrong to not have characters like Zangief, Blanca, Honda, or Cammie in one of these games. On top of that, the new characters don't feel interesting. This motley bunch seems to have been either taken from the original Street Fighter (not something you want to remind people of), drawn from Final Fight for some reason, or were genuine new creations. Sure, Rose is fine, but you would want to have her added in addition to the favorites, not in place of them. But I'm not a Fighting game guy, so what do I know.
The hell is this thing supposed to be?
That brings us to the biggest issue with Street Fighter Alpha. I mentioned when looking at Virtua Fighter 2 that I'm under the impression that the Fighting genre began alienating casual players in the late-90's. As far as I can tell, the major fighting game studios gradually increased the mechanical complexity of their games throughout the 90's to keep up with the needs of their committed players. The increasing skill ceilings in the major franchises made most of the gameplay largely inscrutable to anyone not in the scene. With the general decline of arcades, there weren't enough hardcore Fighting game sickos to economically justify a large market for the genre before online play became feasible. I can see that process play out in this game.
Some interesting ideas about the human body, all around
From what I've read, there were apparently several important changes to the high-level gameplay featured here. There's a whole thing going on with the super meter and the management of such. There's something called an Alpha Counter, which sure. This is also supposed to be the game where air blocking, throw recovery, and some kind of animation cancelling got introduced. This is all barely comprehensible; I can't even consistently get off a frickin' Hadouken on a Playstation d-pad. In the universe of people with money to burn on video games, there are more people like me than not. Ignoring that group is a good way for developers to box themselves into an ever-shrinking demographic. I fully expect that by the time I get to it, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Street Fighter III and Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. What I'm trying to get at is that I think Divekick is the best Fighting game ever made.
It's so hard to find anything to say about this game. It's literally a boring re-skin of NBA Jam. Remember how Iguana handled the console ports of both NBA Jam and Tournament Edition? Turns out they took that TE framework, stripped out all the branding, and half-heartedly inserted the NCAA license. This thing feels like some kind of low-effort ROM hack, where the players were exchanged with generic copy-pasted models. I played only half a match before quitting out of ennui. Let's see what details we can glean from this thing.
The worst part is that there are too few teeth
I'm not going to describe the gameplay here, because it's literally NBA Jam. I will keep repeating that until it loses all meaning, this is literally NBA Jam. I only noticed one change between this and TE: instead of being able to choose two out of three players on a team, you get to choose two out of five players on a team. This is probably due to the change in licensing. With the NBA license, you get the likeness of real players, which is engaging for players but kind of a hassle for developers. As a dev, you would need to make the bobblehead players kinda resemble the actual guys. Because the NCAA wasn't paying its players, their likenesses couldn't be licensed. This means that the developers of an NCAA game like this could either make up players and approximate likenesses, or they could save money and create one player model per position archetype. That's probably why there's a larger roster in College Slam, there's like six total player models and no names. Even still, with the increased options you could probably get into the weeds by swapping between more different kinds of players, but who the hell was playing this game at that high a level?
We dared to ask: What if NBA Jam was uninteresting?
For the reasons stated above, the visual design and style are a major step backwards from NBA Jam: TE. This feels like a store-brand knockoff or something. There's so little to latch onto here, other than the irrational offense that I took at this thing's existence. What really makes me mad, though, is that because this uses the exact same engine and mechanics of a better game, it's still basically competent. You could play this game and have an adequate time if you didn't know any better. Its mediocrity means that I can't stick this at the bottom of my rankings out of spite like I want to, I'm trying to have something resembling consistent standards.
As much as I hate to admit it, I can see how a kid in the mid-90's could have had a good time with this game. There are parts of the U.S. where if someone sees the letters 'UK' they'll think of the University of Kentucky before anything else, as it should be. If a kid in one of those households got this game and had never played NBA Jam, they would have loved this thing. This line of thought is a bummer, so let's move on.
I'd never heard of this game before now. That's why when I saw the title, I had a feeling that resembled hope. I imagined something along the lines of Charlie Murder but with ska. A ska themed Beat 'Em Up or 2D Action game would be rad, maybe something with a trombone rocket launcher and too much checkerboard. That would be a cool, but this is not that game. There isn't even a bazooka in this accursed trash.
Oof, where to start, where to start. How about with the opening scene. This game nearly broke me before I even got to the main menu. When starting this thing up, you're subjected to 4+ minutes of a sizzle reel containing about two dozen basic 3d animations cycled through in different combinations. This is accompanied by music that, to my non-musical ears, sounds like an electronica jam band lazily noodling around. This thing was the longest 4-5 minutes of my life. I felt like I was losing my mind after seeing the same bendy guitar and keyboard player animations for the fourth time. It's like you took a bunch of 90's bowling alley animations and stitched them together in the dullest music video imaginable.
That guitar doesn't even work like a bazooka, it's a machine gun
It seems that the main gimmick with this thing is the music. It's supposed to be some kind of genre bending combination of house music, funk, and guitar riffs. This is largely a failure, with only a couple of later songs on the soundtrack being any good. This gimmick is supposed to be reinforced by the premise of playing as the guitarist front man of some band who has to get his favorite guitar back from the devil and escape hell. I had to look that up, there is no storytelling of any kind in this game. No set-up, no writing, no named characters, just what was apparently written in the manual, like it's 1989 or some shit. I'm assuming that you play as the titular Mr. Bazookatone, but who knows. The only thing I got out of this game is that the first level is called "Sin Sin Penitentiary", which in practice is just a generic graveyard level. I'm not going to unpack all of that, or even touch it with a ten-foot pole.
The actual game part of this is a painfully uninteresting 2D Action Platformer. You walk to the right, pick-up Bubsy amounts of the one collectible, shoot enemies, and wrestle with the controls. Everything about the movement feels off, which is exacerbated by what seems like the movement tech that you're supposed to use. If you jump and point your gun down, you can slow your descent. This feels terrible in practice, but it's probably the key to some of the weird platforming issues. Otherwise, the enemies are uninteresting, and the overall combat design feels incompetent.
STOP MAKING GRAVEYARD LEVELS. YES, YOU.
Incompetent is probably the operative word to use here. From the opening movie to the details of the level design to the Tex Avery-esque copy-pasted art assets in the levels, this whole thing feels slapdash and barely put together. The whole package doesn't feel low-budget as much as it feels no-budget. If you told me that this was a student project from 2009, I would call it a promising but flawed first try. If this was a mid-aughts flash game, I would be impressed that a teenager was able to get 3D models working that well, but otherwise it would be lackluster. As an actual product, it's a disaster in any time period.
None of this should have been surprising, I saw the studio/publisher combo before starting the game. Yet, I hoped that Arc Developments would have at least made a little good on what looks like a passion project. Unfortunately, playing this game after World Series Golf in such a short span of time is like taking two to the back of the head. None of the games they made after this came out on consoles in North America, which is something to be thankful for, but these last two games were multi-platform. We're not going to be rid of 'ol John Bazooks anytime soon.
Maybe I wasn't in the right state of mind for Krazy Ivan, or maybe there is no right state of mind for this game. What we have here is a mech-based FPS with FMV cutscenes. So, like Ghen War but worse.
Starting with that FMV, I think this is finally the game that broke me. I don't like bad FMV anymore. There are plenty of games with atrocious acting and casual racism, but for some reason this is the straw that broke the camel's back. *sigh* Anyway, the premise is that in the near future there's an alien invasion and humanity's only hope is a violent psycho driving a junky looking post-soviet mech. Most of the characters are supposed to be Russian, and the writing makes the most of outdated Soviet stereotypes. Even if we weren't currently in a moment that isn't amenable to heroic Russian characters in fiction, this would still be bad due to the lazy writing and abysmal acting. I'm not even going to touch the intro for the Saudi Arabia level.
*Slaps game box* You can fit so much racism in this bad boy
So, let's ignore and repress all memories of that crap. The game itself is broken out into six open zones that all feature the same kind of level design and are identically structured. A summary of that structure: you are dropped into the middle of a map, there are three points of interest in different parts of the map which each contains a boss fight, after completing those three points of interest there is a fourth boss that is just a static shield generator. Each boss has a name and some kind of gimmick, but not with that much differentiation. The levels themselves are like low-poly versions of the uncharted planets from Mass Effect. Your mech has the standard infinite ammo pea shooter, with limited ammo lasers, rockets, and other weapons that can be unlocked and equipped. The guns have a highly restrictive cooldown meter on them that will be important later on. An odd point is that there is a very short time limit that counts down when you aren't in a boss arena, though the only thing to do in the open zones is shoot random MoBs for power-ups.
The actual combat is decidedly mediocre. The solution to all of life's problems is to circle strafe the bad guy, and this game does nothing to disabuse that philosophy. You strafe every boss while shooting them and try not to get shot. The attack patterns become larger and boss health increases between levels, but otherwise it’s the same tactic every time. I only ran into problems because a boss in the second level had a hitbox too small for my missiles and the main gun wasn't doing any damage to it. There's only one life per level and dying causes a game over and credits before spitting you to the load screen. You can save progress between levels, which is an improvement over other games we've seen, but that's saying very little. The lack of interest in the combat combined with the amount of time needed to get back to the point you died chills any desire to play this thing.
This is less interesting than it looks
There are also a few weird quibbles with the movement. Even though the mech moves faster than any other mech game so far, you're weirdly constrained by the hilly terrain which you can't readily navigate. There's no jumping and you can't Skyrim or Mako your way up hills. Yet, the bosses and MoBs can easily go up and down the terrain, which feels like it's either unfair or an oversight. The worst thing, though, is that the strafe is semi-automatic. Some explanation, strafing is done using the L1/R1 buttons, which is fair enough, but each press of the button only leads to a single step. Holding down the button doesn't automatically lead to any additional steps. This means that you need to jam on the shoulder buttons while feathering the d-pad to maintain aim and managing the fire button, because cooldown, in order to successfully circle strafe an enemy. This initially has the effect of trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, and after a while can cause ergonomic issues. It's all around a sub-par experience.
Oh right, there's a decent upgrade system
Another reason to not have any motivation with the gameplay is that completing a level rewards the player with terrible cutscenes, which is more of a punishment than anything else. God, I don't like thinking about this game. Psygnosis is burning me out, so let's all pretend that this thing never happened. I'm going to go lay down now.
When I started this blog series, I really did not expect to get turned so completely against British game development, yet here we are. A few weeks without a US Gold or Psygnosis game should do me good. Hold on, did that cursed monkey paw just curl a finger? Anyway, let's check in with the Ranking of All PS1 Games:
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