An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time we struggled through the May 1996 releases of wipEout, Iron Storm: World Advanced Strategy, Earthworm Jim 2, Slam 'n' Jam '96 Featuring Magic and Kareem, Rise 2: Resurrection, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game, and Striker '96.
I hope you like sports, because we're beginning our journey through June with Virtual Open Tennis, In The Hunt, NBA Action, Skeleton Warriors, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and Primal Rage.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Virtual Open Tennis
Developer: Imagineer
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 5/31/1996
Time to Getting Served: 24 Minutes
I'm asking that everyone reading this please contain their overabundant hype, because we're starting this month off with a middling, forgotten Tennis game. Oh, and don't pay any mind to the release date, I didn't feel like covering this in the last installment. The only genuinely interesting thing I was able to get out of this one is the randomness of its developer. Imagineer was/is a Japanese game studio that started life in the 80's importing and translating American games such as SimCity and Lemmings. When they branched out into their own original development in the mid 90's they started with games that aretoo obscure for me to describe. Virtual Open Tennis appears to be their first game to have gotten any amount of international release, and likely played a role in giving them the room to make the series they are most known for, Medabots. I know absolutely nothing about the Medabots franchise, though it appears to still be going. They never really set the world on fire, but they're still around which is something.
As for the game, there's very little of note going on here. You have the by now expected single match, tournament, and two player modes with the welcome addition of a pretty good practice mode. The gameplay itself is typical of the genre, right down to questionable acceleration in player movement. I'm also as bad at this thing as I was at the contemporary V-Tennis. Speaking of which, these two Tennis games had just about simultaneous launches on competing systems, making them a good test case for comparing these consoles. The problem is that I have a hard time even remembering V-Tennis, since it is so unremarkable that all knowledge of it escaped my brain weeks ago. Digging back through my notes, the only thing I can say for certain is that this game looks worse than its PS1 competitor. If anything, Virtual Open Tennis looks more like a polygonalized Genesis game. Though both games have the quirk of the racket's hitbox extending noticeably past the model. I'm not even sure which of these I would recommend since both are going to go down the memory hole as soon as I publish this post. Maybe this game edges out just from the practice mode. Regardless, we can all agree that Power Serve 3D Tennis is the absolute worst.
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In The Hunt
Developer: SIMS
Publisher: Kokopeli
Release Date: 6/4/1996
Time to One Ping Only: 15 Minutes
We last saw this thing in Part 020 of the PS1 series. Even though this Saturn version was released about three months after the PS1 version, this is largely an identical experience. The only difference I noticed is that it runs worse here, with more slowdown than I remember, and a noticeable loading pause before boss fights. For those reasons, the PS1 release would be the recommended version if you're for some reason choosing between console ports of this game.
Really, the primary difference here is that the extra three months puts this port of In The Hunt as coming out after the arcade release of Metal Slug. Remember that this game was made in '93 by the team at Irem who would quit to form their own studio, Nazca, and build on what they had been developing without corporate interference. I'm not sure if putting out the home port of their previous game before or after Metal Slug makes more sense. As far as I know, it took a while for that series to build a fanbase after release, and it wouldn't be until 2001 that one of those games would come out on anything other than the Neo Geo in North America. I'm guessing it didn't matter what Irem did with this game, since it likely would have been just as forgotten either way. That's a shame because this ought to be better remembered as a "Metal Slug Zero".
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NBA Action
Developer: Gray Matter
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 6/5/1996
Time to Letting Mookie Cook: 23 Minutes
Oh hey, it's the first Sega Sports branded Basketball game for the Saturn. They missed the previous year with NBA Action '95 coming out on the Genesis, because I guess the Saturn wasn't important enough to warrant the effort. But now Sega has their very own Basketball game to go up against Sony's NBA ShootOut. Remember ShootOut? I for one try not to. Let's see how these two compare and whether we can glean anything about the relative quality of the consoles from this comparison (spoiler: we can't).
On the surface, this has all of the standard modes and options we've come to expect from Basketball games of the era, so on the surface it's normal enough. As is usually the case, the experience takes a turn for the worse once we get into a match. First, this thing doesn't look particularly good. The polygons are noticeably jagged, the animations are jittery, and it's tricky to keep track of the ball. That last point is due to the two biggest problems, this thing uses a down-court camera and there is too little UI letting you know which player you're controlling at any moment. I've gone off on this type of camera angle before since we've seen it in both NBA in the Zone and Slam n' Jam 96. I'm looking forward to when games stop doing this because it's just awful. Think about it like this, when the camera is looking down-court it has to move to follow the action, which means up to one half the court can be behind you and out of sight. Also, being an early 3D game, there are depth perception issues along the axis extending away from the camera, which in this case is the hoop you're trying to shoot at or defend. This creates problems where your character can easily fall off the screen playing defense and shot distance can be hard to determine on offense. Compare this to a side-on camera angle, like that used in NBA Live and ShootOut. Less of the court falls out of frame as the camera pans and the depth issues are on the thin part of the court. There a clear cut good and bad way to present basketball, and this game falls on the wrong side.
Other than the camera, there's no visual indicator of who you're controlling for defense and the controls generally feel unresponsive. Playing this game is a hassle and never at any point enjoyable. These are problems shared between Action and ShootOut. Since Sony's game has technically better graphics and the correct camera angle, I'll have to give it the edge, but at this point we're choosing between the worst of the best and the best of the worst. Not that any of this mattered at the time, NBA Action received little attention or fanfare and likely undersold compared to its Genesis predecessors. There's also an odd thing with Sega trying to make this a yearly series in the mid 90's but having a different studio work on each one. There isn’t any real creative reason to do that, so it seems to me like this franchise was a rambling catastrophe. That conclusion is supported by the fact we aren't going to see the next and last NBA Action until the end of the Saturn's lifespan, missing the window for the '97 season and jumping straight to ‘98.
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Skeleton Warriors
Developer: Neversoft
Publisher: Playmates Entertainment
Release Date: 6/5/1996
Time to Not Selling Any Toys: 38 Minutes
Hey, remember Skeleton Warriors? You know, the 2D Action game based on the failed early 90's cartoon? The one that's a knock-off of the sDold-style Castlevania games? Well, no one at the time seems to have paid much attention either. We last saw it in Part 023 of the PS1 series and it is, so far, a frontrunner for "Most Surprisingly Mid Game of 1996". Of more pressing concern for us is the Saturn version being just about identical to the PS1 release. I played this one most of the way to where I left off last time and noticed no meaningful difference. That leaves extremely little to talk about. Actually, I'm still kinda baffled as to why this thing even exists.
It's unclear why Neversoft cut work on their Genesis game using this license in favor of making something for next gen consoles. The show went off air in late '94, and even though Sega's 16-bit consoles were winding down, they still could have gotten it out in early '95 and done about as well as this thing on the PS1 and Saturn. Maybe doing it this way secured more funding from Playmates? There's nothing in the gameplay demanding NEXT GEN POWER. The only stuff I can see that would require 3D processing are the action figure-esque character models and the extremely poor vehicle sections. I dunno, man. The more I think about it the more bizarre the existence of this game gets.
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Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
Developer: Iguana Entertainment
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Release Date: 6/7/1996
Time to Saying No To Steroids: 15 Minutes
We last saw our friend Frank Thomas not too long ago in Part 025 of the PS1 series. This was another surprisingly good game and the best Baseball game I've yet seen on these consoles. Happily, this version is basically identical to its PS1 counterpart. Sadly, that leaves us with almost nothing more to say about it. Let's see, apparently Frank Thomas got his nickname "The Big Hurt" from a commentator who said he put the big hurt into a home run ball. I was going to say that’s kinda dumb, but all sports nicknames are at least a little dumb when placed under enough scrutiny. Why do athletes get nicknames anyway? I can see why it would've happened in the age of radio, but there doesn't seem to be much of a point these days. I suppose sports are very tradition oriented in general, so it could take longer for habits to die out after they stop being useful. This is becoming too mysterious for my taste, so I'll leave you with a reminder that winners sometimes cheat, and cheaters always win. But not Frank Thomas, he would never.
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Primal Rage
Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: Time Warner Interactive
Release Date: 6/14/1996
Time to Diablo Conquers: 13 Minutes
Man, it's been a while since Part 008 of the PS1 series. In reflection, I think my writing has improved but I've definitely become much less committed to the whole premise/playthrough/graphics/sound/conclusion format that I tended to lean on. Maybe I'm burned out after playing so many similar or repeat games. Maybe Crystal Dynamics broke me as a person. Can we ever go back to who we used to be? Should we even want to? Is any of this even worth it? What the hell are video games, really?
Anyway, Primal Rage is still a bad 2D Fighting game with novel claymation sprites and an exceptionally misguided notion about "what the kids are into". It's the tribal post-apocolyptic game where you play as dumb t-rex and King Kong knockoffs. Going from memory, I think this Saturn version looks a bit sharper and moves smoother than the earlier PS1 release. That's not saying much, but it does technically make this the best console port of the game.
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It really was all downhill after April, huh? I don’t have a lot of hope for what we’re going to see after Nights Into Dreams comes and goes in July. Oh well, let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
30. Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball
32. In The Hunt
39. Skeleton Warriors
42. Primal Rage
54. Virtual Open Tennis
63. NBA Action
…
85. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Next time we're going to switch gears and go back in time with mixed metaphors and the first batch of games for the Atari Jaguar released in 1994. So, look forward to Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, and Alien vs. Predator.
After that it's back to the Saturn in June '96 with fewer sports and the same amount of ports as we continue through the middle releases of the month with Shellshock, Baku Baku Animal, Gungriffon, Creature Shock: Special Edition, Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed, and Road Rash.
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I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the depravity of the 3DO and tilting at every possible windmill involving PS1 RPGs.
I streamed all these games, and you can watch the archive below.
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