An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time we wound the clock back to 1994 to look at the Jaguar releases of Tempest 2000, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, and Alien vs. Predator.
Last time with the Saturn we slam dunked a home run for 15-love when we looked at Virtual Open Tennis, In The Hunt, NBA Action, Skeleton Warriors, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball, and Primal Rage.
Now we're continuing our journey through June '96 with Shellshock, Baku Baku Animal, Gungriffon, Creature Shock: Special Edition, Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed, and Road Rash.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Shellshock
Developer: Core Design
Publisher: U.S. Gold
Release Date: 6/14/1996
Time to Intervening in Yugoslavia: 21 Minutes
When we first saw this game in Part 027 of the PS1 series, I noted the bad gameplay and how it really didn't nail its blaxploitation A-Team concept. The Saturn version is basically identical, and all of my previous commentary applies. I also hoped out loud that I would have something to say about the giant red flag at the core of this experience by the time we got here. In that regard I set myself up for failure. The only thing I can add is that something which would otherwise be a negative, poor sound mixing in the cutscenes, is actually a boon for this game considering the quality of the writing and voice acting. At the same time, in the intervening months I figured out that one of the producers of this thing is Afro-British, which raises enough uncertainty with the development background that I hesitate to jump up and down on it too much. The only other part of this game with enough substance for critique is the fictionalized Yugoslav Wars setting which, if anything, was a choice for 1996. Notice how none of what I've written about so far involves the gameplay, since there's nothing of substance to latch onto there. I'm just going to follow in the footsteps of contemporary reviewers and never think about this game again.
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Baku Baku Animal
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 6/19/1996
Time to Hom Nom Nom: 44 Minutes
Our first of two new games for this week is, well, it certainly is something. This is a competitive Tile Matching Puzzle game originally released to Japanese arcades in 1995. That puts this a year before Puzzle Fighter, which is my touchpoint for early games of the genre. I don't think this was one of Sega's bigger titles, since it was made on the Titan Video instead of Model 1 or 2 architecture. The Titan Video board was basically a Saturn in an arcade cabinet. Yet, none of this high-level description conveys the weirdness of the thing.
If you've played any kind of battle Tetris or Puzzle Fighter type of game, you understand the basic concept. The gameplay revolves around matching colored blocks falling from the top of the play area in large enough chunks or combos to generate junk on an opposing play area, and the first area with a stack touching the top losing. The gimmick in Baku Baku involves the Animal part of its name. Each block color has two types, animal blocks and corresponding food blocks. You need to stack up food blocks of one type and drop the matching animal anywhere next to it. The more food blocks the animal eats in one go, the bigger the score. Visually this is represented with pairings like pandas with bamboo on the green blocks or bananas with monkeys on yellow. The presentation is colorful and cutesy, as you would expect from the genre, but also kinda deranged in ways that should be noted.
Instead of doing the sane thing and sticking with 2D art, like what Taito did with Bubble Bobble, everything but the blocks are in polygonal 3D. In some ways, the look reminds me of Mystaria but with the sensibilities of Clockwork Knight, which is not a flattering comparison. There really is no polygonal rendering that's janky in quite the way that you get with the Saturn. Here are a few glimpses into this fever dream:
That's right, when you lose a giant lion head eats the player character. I'm sure that's the only question you have. Stuff like that, the random boob nurse, metal versions of all the characters, and the fact that the main two kids are called Poly and Gon demonstrates that there is plenty of personality here. There is a plot premise, which I think is about a zookeeping tournament in a fantasy kingdom or something. I dunno, the point is the puzzle battles. There also isn't much in the way of modes, mainly consisting of the expected ladder and two-player options. That's thin, but normal for arcade ports. It's all generally competent, but not really anything to write home about.
Baku Baku Animal reviewed decently in both Japanese arcades and international home consoles. There isn't really anything particularly wrong with it but also nothing to get excited about. I don't know enough to be sure, but I would guess that the core gimmick doesn't hold up well in high-level competitive play, which might be why it fell to the wayside as quickly as it did. Also, I have a hard time fathoming why this was released outside of Japan. I mean, I'm not complaining, but it's clear that a bare minimum of effort was put into translating the in-game text, and without it having spent time in western arcades, no one would have known what the deal was with this game. They didn't even bother to localize the title. Apparently 'Baku Baku' is a Japanese onomatopoeia for a chomping noise. This could have been a cult classic if it was better than good or released on the PS1, but instead it had the same fate as most other Saturn exclusives.
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Gungriffon
Developer: GameArts
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 6/19/1996
Time to ALL SYSTEMS BROKEN: 97 Minutes
It feels like there's a lot that should be said about Gungriffon, but I don't feel like I have enough experience with Mech games to speak authoritatively about it. I've never touched any kind of Mechwarrior or Steel Battalion anything. I've just recently touched an Armored Core game (more on that in a few weeks). I can only speak to what I've already seen from these 32-bit consoles. As such, that means I'm going to compare this experience to stuff like Ghen War or Crazy Ivan. I see that Mechwarrior 2 came out around this time, but I don't know nothin' about it.
Because this is a somewhat convoluted first-person mech shooter, it's likely in the same vein as the old Mechwarrior games but simplified for console play. Though, the setting is much closer to the more problematic aspects of the Front Mission series. So, I choose to view this as, "what if Battletech was in the Front Mission universe." Though, these mechs are called Armored Walking Gun Systems, which are totally not lances or wanzers, I swear. They also don't have cores beneath that armor, apparently. I'm not going to go into detail on the premise, partly because of confusing retcons and partly because it's massively stupid. The basic gist is that in the future Europe and Russia form a multinational union state and all of east Asia form another one in retaliation, leading to WWIII. This means that the missions take place in former Soviet regions and northern China. There's briefing text throughout, but since each mission boils down to the standard 'kill everything' objective, none of it matters.
There are eight of those missions in total, and they're kind of motherfuckers. This comes down to the controls and what the game demands that you do with them. I want to describe them, but I think I need a visual aid to really get it across, so take a look:
To move you use the two left buttons to throttle forward and back, there isn't a direct control over the walk. Holding down either the left trigger or B changes the d-pad from turning and up/down aiming to either independent turret rotation or strafing with up/down aiming. There are four weapons that are swapped with the C button, the loadout of which doesn't change. The jump/hover doesn't feel great, and the Z button isn't convenient placement for it. Finally, the less said about the night vision the better. There's a lot to keep track of and a bunch of abnormal handholds you need to do. That's because each mission has way more enemies than you have health and ammo, meaning you need to do some fancy footwork and accurate weapon usage at the same time. Combine that with the busy UI and limited field of view and you get a very severe experience.
The missions are a combination of broken urban environments and open fields, but in either case the helicopters are going to be the biggest problem. That's because they like to hover right above you and you can't aim that far up, which makes you use the hover jump to shoot them while exposing yourself to ground fire. Also, there is a way to recover some health and ammo, which is to get over to a resupply helicopter, assuming it doesn't get shot down on the way. The amount of healing and resupply is poorly communicated and feels inconsistent. Oh, and each missions has a hard time limit, so you can't carefully pick off enemies, you gotta always be oscar mike. From that information, it shouldn't be surprising that in my hour-and-a-half with this game, I only beat one out of the first four available missions. On the easy difficulty. That brutality is a symptom of the overall issue with this game, it tries to inhabit a middle point in a genre that was only able to support two extremes at the time.
When looking at more action-oriented mech games, such as the contemporary Ghen War and Crazy Ivan, they play more like plodding First Person Shooters than anything else. They're maybe one step removed from the Genki-style corridor based mech shooters, such as Kileak ("Kill-eek") or Robotica. At the other extreme or those PC-based Battletech games, which were oriented squarely at the grognard simulation audience. Gungriffon tries to place itself in the middle, with moderately paced action and an interface simple enough to fit on a six-button controller but deep enough to feel like a piece of military equipment. It doesn't really nail any of those ambitions, but it was also kind of the only game inhabiting that niche on consoles until Armored Core dropped the next year. That was enough for it to review well at the time, likely because it made action game reviewers feel smart, and sold enough to get sequels. In fact, the Gungriffon series would go up until 2004, dying out only slightly before Game Arts' other two franchises, Lunar and Grandia. Oh right, this was made by the Lunar and Grandia people. I probably buried the lede by only mentioning that now. Whoops. Anyway, despite this being a bad game that I suck at, I still have largely positive feelings towards it. I can't really articulate why, maybe I'm like the contemporary reviewers and just feel smart because I figured out how to play damn thing.
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Creature Shock: Special Edition
Developer: Interactive Studios
Publisher: Data East
Release Date: 6/24/1996
Time to N/A: 13 Minutes
It was bound to happen eventually, and it has happened here. I was reticent going into a Saturn blog series because I was under the impression that Saturn emulation wasn't fully baked. I've largely been proven wrong about that so far, which has been a pleasant surprise. That is, until now. Sadly, or luckily as we'll get to in a second, this game didn't work after the opening cutscene. This thing is apparently in a similar style to Cyberia, which itself falls into the loose genre of cinematic multi-gameplay experiences that heavily utilized pre-rendered graphics. I regard Rebel Assault as the template for this kind of game. Though I wouldn't know anything about this one firsthand.
Honestly, I don't think I'm missing much. The contemporary reviews were excoriating in a way that you don't see for games that had any budget behind them. I mean, IGN gave it a 2/10 with the warning to "avoid…like your life depends on it." So, the busted emulation probably did my mental health a favor here, but at the cost of keeping this thing off the ranking list. If this turn of events bums you out, don't worry, there's a 3DO version.
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Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed
Developer: Pioneer Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 6/25/1996
Time to The Need To Stop Playing This Game: 21 Minutes
This is the third, and hopefully final, time that I've had to touch this game. We've been here before, looking at the original and weird 3DO release and the miserable expanded experience in Part 021 of the PS1 series. This final release is functionally identical to the PS1 version, so there isn't anything to say about the gameplay itself. To reiterate, the game is bad. It's a bad racing game. But there is one thing I want to stop and talk through before moving on.
It shouldn't be surprising that this thing is going to rank below average in the Ranking of All Saturn Games. It also didn't fare too well in the PS1 or 3DO rankings yet looking back on all three experiences I have the kindest opinion towards the 3DO original. That's weird, since there is almost no content in that game. It's a glorified tech demo, yet the act of playing it was more enjoyable than either version of the later update. If you recall, that 3DO release of Track & Speed Presents: The Need for Road featured only a handful of point-to-point one-on-one races and the entirety of the content could be seen in like half an hour. It's a terrible value proposition in the context of being a full-priced game, and I dinged it as such. Yet, it is far less frustrating of an experience than any of the shit going on in the game after an additional two years of work. I consider this an odd case of a game getting worse after having its flaws fixed. I'm not entirely sure what to do with that.
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Road Rash
Developer: Electronic Arts
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 6/25/1996
Time to Ramping Off A Pedestrian: 20 Minutes
Also for the third and final time, we have to look at the 3DO Road Rash game. I hate to say it, but dealing with EA releases specifically is making me look forward to the post-1997 era where it was physically impossible for publishers to put identical games on the PS1 and N64. I've covered this game all the way back in Part 014 of the PS1 series and more recently in the 3DO series (CW for plumbers and ties in that link), and now we have to acknowledge it for the third calendar year in a row. This is literally the same game as the other versions. It was decent in '94, mid in '95, and crusty in '96. For some reason, I think the gameplay looks slightly different between the three versions, but that could just be in my head. Even still, as done as I am with this thing, I would still probably take it over most other Saturn third party games, which might be the most damning thing I could say about this system.
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We're two-thirds of the way through June and nearing our mid-year checkpoint with the Saturn. I swear these middling multiplatform games are going to be the end of me. Oh well, let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games and get out of here.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
12. Baku Baku Animal
32. Gungriffon
38. Road Rash
54. Shellshock
58. Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed
…
90. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Next time we're going to finish the month with the Saturn when we look at Shockwave Assault, Shining Wisdom, Golden Axe: The Duel, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and Worms. I've been hiding a not-that-dark secret from you, dear reader, and this next entry will be the moment when I will finally have to reveal myself.
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I stream twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. We're diving into the forgotten depths of Saturn and Jaguar games and tilting at every FromSoft windmill.
The stream archive of myself playing these games can be watched below.
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