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

Last time we looked at the September '95 lineup of Minnesota Fats: Pool Legend, Virtual Hydlide, Shinobi Legions, Cyber Speedway, Shanghai: Triple-Threat, Virtua Fighter Remix.

Between then and now, I put out a special post looking deeper into the Hydlide franchise.

This week we will look at the games released for the Saturn in October 1995: NHL All-Star Hockey, World Series Baseball, Off-World Interceptor Extreme, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire, SimCity 2000, and Black Fire.

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NHL All-Star Hockey

Release Date: 10/2/1995

Developer: Grey Matter

Publisher: Sega

Time to The Hell Is An Offside?: 28 Minutes

We're starting October off with sports. Sports, everyone's favorite genre of non-video games and, I suppose, some peoples' favorite genre of video games. In this case, we must look at Sega's early attempt at Hockey. This was one of those cross-gen games where the Genesis version probably got more play, and somehow, I was able to intuit that fact just from playing this damned thing.

From the jump, the opening FMV is boring and takes too long. That doesn't mean very much but it serves as a portent of things to come. This thing has the variety of modes that someone in '95 would probably have expected from a sports game, so no complaints there. Though, the FMV commentators rotoscoped into the main menu are very off-putting in almost an uncanny valley kind of way. That decision is creatively a swing and a miss, which I'm told is a sport saying or something. Getting into the season mode, I encountered the strangest thing I've ever seen or heard of in a sports game. It seems that you can choose multiple teams to play throughout the season, and if two of your selected teams are playing against each other, you choose which one to control. This is odd, and maybe it was set up to insert a two-player experience into that mode. Whichever reason, it's possible to select every team in the league and play through an entire season engineering your preferred outcome.

So far, I've only written about the menus, which, while hefty, are not the actual game. When I eventually started a match and got playing, I discovered this game's secret: it's bad. This game seems to err more on the side of sim gameplay where NHL '95 errs more on side of arcade gameplay. That piece of design philosophy is what Kills this experience. The movement is slow and feels sluggish, shooting and passing the puck doesn't seem to do what you want it to do, there's a lot of fouls, and the goalkeepers are almost impenetrable. On top of that, the AI is wonky. I noticed on multiple occasions players on the opposing team getting caught up on the far wall for some reason. None of this is helped by the camera angle, which takes a low-angle side-on approach. While I would recommend this camera angle for a Basketball game, it doesn't work well for Hockey. The main issue being that when any player is skating with the puck, you can't see the damn thing. At a few points, this caused me to lose track of the thing and get confused about what was even going on. This all adds up to a bad time, which is why I didn't even make it through one match before exiting out in disgust.

On a side note, I kept getting something called an "offside". I have no idea what this means or why it happens. The internet exists, so I could look it up. Yet, I'm not going to stoop to the level of googling rules for sports of dubious authenticity. Looking up rules for Hockey would be like looking up the rules for Quidditch or something equally absurd. I'll let offsides remain a mystery to me in the same way that the rules of Bloodbowl are a mystery to me.

The game being crap is kind of a shame because it looks and runs ok enough. The reflections of the players on the ice are nice if not subtle and the player sprites are nice and big. Musically, there's nothing to write home about. The audience sounds are what you would want, but the commentary is noticeably trash. In the end, I had a bad time and was mildly baffled by it. In other words, it's a sports game.

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World Series Baseball

Release Date: 10/2/1995

Developer: Sega

Publisher: Sega

Time to Playing The Dumbest Game of Baseball: 47 Minutes

Next up, we have Baseball. I'm still traumatized by Bases Loaded '96 (which is guaranteed to haunt me again before long) so I was highly reticent to play World Series Baseball. Fortunately, this is a better game. Unfortunately, I still hated being alive while playing it, so I guess fuck this entire genre.

The intro cutscene has a similar "Hello fellow teens" hip-hop song selection as NHL All-Star Hockey and the features list is similarly filled out. The set-up for the season mode is more sensible than that other game, and the menuing is much less bad than in something like Bases Loaded '96. There's very little to comment on outside of the gameplay.

And that gameplay is basically fine for what this game is. The timing for batting isn't the worst and the pitching controls make sense. The outfield gameplay feels sluggish and terrible, though we're probably several years out from any baseball game doing that well. I was never able to figure out how to get an outfielder to throw the ball at the correct base, which led to me conceding a whole heaping helping of bases to the other team. It also took me most of the one match I played to figure out how to get my players to run more than a single on a hit, which caused me to lose some runs. All of that said, it looks decent enough and the stadium noises are basically ok. The UI is a hell of a lot better than my only other touchpoint of Bases Loaded '96, but that isn't saying much. This all sounds incredibly average, but somehow the gameplay balance is off enough to make my one match very dumb by the standards of Baseball.

I played against the Padres, whom I know nothing about. What I do know is that the AI for them is monstrous. They hit a home run off me in the second inning before I had figured out the controls, which is just unsporting. When I eventually did somewhat figure out how to play, I scored eight runs in one inning entirely off of singles. The AI would go on to hit three more home runs off me and I kept hitting singles with every other batter. I also figured out that most of the Padres' players didn't know how to deal with fastballs, so I kept spamming those. The game ended with me winning 12-11, which is very dumb. For non-Americans, imagine a league 'football' match where the teams scored 12-11, and imagine all the stupid shit that would need to happen to get that result. Also, each team beaned each other with the ball at least once. The only reason I didn't quit the game after 20 minutes is that I noticed the game was being dumb and I wanted to see where that went. I realize that a lot of this paragraph wouldn't make sense to most of the world, but you're all nerds who should have seen at least one baseball anime in your life, so it shouldn't be that mysterious.

Lastly, I want to make a note about the Sega Sports branding on these last two games. It seems that after Electronic Arts thought to put their sports games all under one banner, Sega saw it and wanted to get in on the action. We've already seen three games with that label: Pebble Beach Golf Links, Worldwide Soccer, and Daytona USA for some reason. In 1995, they were still pretty early into this initiative, but both NHL All-Stars Hockey and World Series Baseball (along with Worldwide Soccer to a lesser extent) would be the precursors to long running Sega published sports series. The only reason why this is interesting is that after Sega meets its fated doom, they would sell the Sega Sports brand to Take-Two, thus spawning the 2K Sports franchise that we all know today. So, this game is basically the first MLB 2K game and NHL All-Star Hockey is the first NHL 2K game, and both series would make it to the beginning of the 2010's. That's kinda neat, I guess.

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Off-World Interceptor Extreme

Release Date: 10/3/1995

Developer: Crystal Dynamics

Publisher: Crystal Dynamics

Time to Getting Moai'd: 20 Minutes

I've tried to run, I've tried to hide, but there is no escape from Crystal Dynamics in the mid-90's. We now must contend with the second overlapping game with the PS1. In case you're in suspense about whether this game is any good, it's basically the same as the PS1 version. Meaning its crap.

This is still a monster truck based semi-on-rails shooter, the gameplay is still bad, and the cutscenes are still both artistically troubling and an affront to good taste. The only things I noticed are that the FMV seems to be at an even lower resolution than on the PS1 and the gameplay seems to run slightly smoother, though that could all be in my head. Also, I only now realized that the "Off-World" in the title might be a play on the phrase "Off-Road". The idea being that instead of being an off-road driving game set in the modern day, it's an off-road driving game set on another planet in the far future. I think that's what's going on, at least.

Since there's nothing else to really say about the Saturn release, I want to harp on the over-dubbed FMV cutscenes a bit more. I don't know if I have seen a more offensive creative decision in a game that didn't involve actual bigotry. There were people who went through the trouble of building that set, writing that script, and casting and directing those actors. And yeah, the result was corny and bad, but it's video game FMV, it was always going to be corny and bad. Did these assholes never play Night Trap or Sewer Shark? If you can reach that level of quality, then you’re fine. The original 3DO Off-World Interceptor even seems to have used the unaltered footage. At some point in the year between then and this version, some jackass decided to record a Mystery Science Theater 3000 style rifftrack over the original footage. This is a problem, because the commentary was done by some low effort C-tier chucklefucks, and the result is one of the least funny things imaginable. So, not only is the inherent humor of the bad FMV drowned out, but that drowning out is being done by what I can only describe as anti-humor. It's almost Dadaistic. Not only that, but the high-level decision of commissioning a rifftrack that shits on work done by people who directly work for you seems like one of the most disrespectful decisions possible. This turns what would have been a mediocre time into an experience that is actively gross and miserable.

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Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire

Release Date: 10/7/1995

Developer: Koei

Publisher: Koei

Time to Losing The Mandate Of Heaven: 45 Minutes

Changing topics entirely, I now have a confession to make: I own the SNES version of this game. There's no specific reason why, and I haven't played much or any of it. I bought the thing as a curiosity. Now, why would I buy and not play the old-gen version of the fourth entry in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms strategy series? My true confession is that I am a big ole' dork for the 14th century novel, Sānguó Yǎnyì.

Written by Luo Guanzhong during the short and chaotic intermediate period between the decline of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty and the rise of the native Ming dynasty, Sānguó Yǎnyì is a massive novel providing a fictionalized telling of the events of the ancient Three Kingdoms Period, which was the intermediate period between the Han and Jin dynasties. Based primarily on an ancient historical chronicle of that period, mixed with dramatic vignettes that were likely from existing artistic interpretations, and spiced with some of Luo's own wish fulfillment in the guise of the character Zhuge Liang, the book has captivated readers for centuries and serves as the first of the four great novels of the Chinese literary canon. It is an epic tale of the generational power struggle for control of the fractured Han Empire, primarily between the Liu, Cao, Sun, and (eventually) Sima families. It frequently conveys the feeling of a Homeric Age of Heroes and includes enough poetic verse to make Tolkien blush. There are too many memorable and important set-pieces and lines of dialogue for any but the most committed nerd to keep straight in their head.

The book wasn't fully translated into English until the early twentieth century, and even then, that translation used the completely fucked Wade-Giles romanization system and took several creative liberties. One of those liberties is in the title, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A literal translation would result in something like Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms; but the translator, catching onto the ahistorical nature of the story, seems to have viewed the novel through the lens of the Romantic movement and named it as such. This has caused immense confusion ever since, because even though it is a multi-generational story, there is almost zero romance and precious few female characters with speaking roles. The book is more like a Bromance of The Three Kingdoms, but I digress. Accurate translations have been released in the last 30 years, but they trade comprehensibility for the impactful prose of the wild-ass original translation. Other than that, it shouldn't surprise you that the book has received a multitude of every kind of adaptation. I'm personally a fan of the overly faithful '90's Chinese TV show, which is both accurate and delightfully campy.

As you can see, I could go on forever with this topic if given the chance. But my ramblings aren't what we're here for, we're here to look at the Saturn release of the fourth entry in Koei's turn-based grand strategy series. Being a cross-gen release, it shouldn't be surprising that it looks and feels like a SNES game. Otherwise, the gameplay systems and menus largely make sense and can be figured out by fans of the genre without too much aimless poking around. Now, just because it's possible to figure out the systems and their interactions, that doesn't mean that it's easy to figure out how one should play the game. Like with any other game of this ilk, it requires several hours of trial and error to figure how to not lose. In my mind, if I'm going to put in those hours I would want to do so with the latest version of the series and not a random entry from the mid-90's. If I already knew the correct way to play these games, then going back to older entries could be interesting. But that's not the case here.

I started a campaign and played long enough to get a sense of what all the menu options are for. After spending over half an hour poking around in the various menu and conversation screens, I launched an ill-fated attack on Yuan Shao just to see what would happen. There's a kind of deep tactical combat layer in this game, which I realized as I got my ass handed to me by the AI. After that, it was pretty much game over and any further time I put in would be kinda wasteful. I never did have much affinity for this series, as Koei's take on strategy gameplay has never gelled with me. On top of everything, this version of the game kinda runs like shit, so the experience has a bogged-down feeling to it. It certainly wouldn't have been bad in its day, but there's very little reason to go back to it anymore.

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Sim City 2000

Release Date: 10/10/1995

Developer: Maxis

Publisher: Maxis

Time to What Is This, A City For Ants?: 15 Minutes

While we're on the subject of ports that run poorly on the Saturn, let's talk about SimCity 2000. It was originally released for the PC in 1993 as the sequel to the landmark City Management Sim. Like with Theme Park and XCOM, the developers of this game must have had a hell of a time trying to get this game to work on brand new console hardware with limited controller functionality. Unfortunately, something seems to have gone very wrong in this case. Either something is wrong with my emulator, or this is the worst PC port so far.

If you've played any City Sim game before, this is the archetypical one of those, and if you are a fan of the genre, you have already played this or you should get it off of GOG or something. The Saturn port has the typical issue of poor controller implementation, though not anywhere near as egregiously bad as XCOM or Lemmings 3D. But that isn't even the main issue: the scrolling is laggy and slow in a way that is physically painful. Even the menus are unresponsive and awful. I also did not find a way to zoom in or out, so the cursor ended up being literally one pixel in size, which is unmanageable. I made it as far as setting up some zoning, building a road, setting up power lines, and putting in water pipes, which is the casual starting point for a game like City: Skylines. Nothing resulted from my doing that and I was again, physically uncomfortable at that point. So, I shut the thing down and ran screaming from my computer.

I have extremely little to say about this game. I have no history with this series and trying to play this game is going to scare me off for some time. Though, I'll need to deal with the PS1 version eventually, and I can only hope that it runs better.

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Black Fire

Release Date: 10/17/1995

Developer: Sega Away Team

Publisher: Sega

Time to Target Lock Denied: 30 Minutes

We end the month with the Saturn's first ever Helicopter Combat game. They grow up so fast. *sniffle*

Because this is a Helicopter Combat game, it has cheapo production values and nothing in terms of plot going for it. The opening cutscene is somehow boring for something showing a protracted helicopter battle. There's a training mode that does no tutorializing and that features aggressive enough AI that I got pasted in a matter of seconds the first time I tried it. I figured it out eventually because the training starts over every time you die. In fact, the restart is so automatic that there is no way to quit out of the mode without restarting the console. Fun. The only other single-player mode is the mission mode. Starting it up leads directly into a very brief briefing for the first mission presented by an unremarkable computer voice.

Getting into the actual game doesn't improve things. The 3D landscape is ugly and indistinct, the flight ceiling is abysmally low, and the HUD is not helpful for figuring out where the objectives are. There's a standard arsenal of missiles that seem to do mostly the same thing. The enemy helicopters tend to fly in swarms and somehow fly above the player, which makes strafing the damn things almost impossible. To compound that problem, the missile lock is finicky, and the less numerous missiles are the only ones that can reliably hit a moving target.

This is all annoying, but what kills the experience is the mission structure. In the first mission there are apparently several ground targets spread out around the middle and north end of the map. Over time, I figured out that they are represented by white dots on the radar and one of the counters in the HUD. None of this is obvious, and no other indication is given as to where the targets are or when you've destroyed one. This would be easier to figure out if the mission didn't have a strict time limit of six minutes. If the clock runs down without hitting every target you fail and restart the mission. There is no way to quit out or rewatch the briefing without restarting the console. The map is large enough and your helicopter is slow enough that the missions can only be accomplished by learning the level through trial and error across multiple failed runs. This is truly the Demon's Souls of helicopter games. My frustration built up and I bailed on this thing after only half an hour.

If all of that wasn't mediocre enough, the music throughout that first mission consisted of what felt like the same 30-second guitar riff repeated ad nauseum. This entire package has the feel of one of those ultra-cheap flight combat games that were ubiquitous on PCs in the late '90's and early '00's. It’s the kind of game that you would buy for $10 at K-Mart or something. This is shockingly slipshod for a Sega release on their own console within its launch window. I have no way to explain how this thing happened, but it bodes ill for the Saturn.

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October '95 was a mediocre month for the Saturn. We saw three multi-platform games, two sports games, and whatever Black Fire was supposed to be. Those all add up to a solid "meh" as an experience. Sega also seems to have had a blank spot in their release calendar for the last two weeks of the month, which is not a good look this close to the holiday season. All of this is better left behind us, so let's move onto the rankings.

These games slot into my Ranking of All Saturn Games in the following spots:

1. Panzer Dragoon

...

8. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire

13. World Series Baseball

16. NHL All-Star Hockey

17. Off-World Interceptor Extreme

19. Black Fire

20. SimCity 2000

...

23. Pebble Beach Golf Links

It looks like Sega finally got their act together and put out 17 games in November '95, so we're going to have to break that month up into multiple chunks. Next time we'll do Part 1 with: Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition, The Mansion of Hidden Souls, Rayman, Theme Park, Virtua Cop, and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition. Are the multi-platform games any better on the Saturn than the PS1? Are the FMV games in any way sane? The answers won't surprise you!