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All PS1 Games In Order: Part 019

An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.

Last week we looked at Striker '96, Alien Trilogy, Psychic Detective, and Brain Dead 13.

This time we're continuing through March with Rise 2: Resurrection, NBA Live 96, NBA ShootOut, and Panzer General.

**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**

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Rise 2: Resurrection

Developer: Mirage

Publisher: Acclaim

Release Date: 3/6/1996

Time to Insane Wins: 23 Minutes

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
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
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.

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NBA Live 96

Developer: EA Canada

Publisher: THQ

Release Date: 3/10/1996

Time to Bullying The Jazz: 45 Minutes

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™!
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*
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…

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NBA ShootOut

Developer: London Studio

Publisher: SCEA

Release Date: 3/10/1996

Time to Offensive Foul: 24 Minutes

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
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
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.

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Panzer General

Developer: SSI

Publisher: SSI

Release Date: 3/10/1996

Time to More Like Shitzkrieg: 52 Minutes

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
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
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
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.

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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.

1. Air Combat

7. NBA Live 96

41. NBA ShootOut

48. Panzer General

58. Rise 2: Resurrection

69. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition

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On Friday we're going to take a trip through the children's section of the 3DO release calendar when we take a Humongous look at Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise, Fatty Bear's Fun Pack, Lemmings, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, and Shelley Duvall's It's A Bird's Life.

Next week, things will start to pick up for the PS1 when we take a peek at Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire, Descent, In The Hunt, and Magic Carpet.

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I streamed these games, with the archive viewable below:

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