An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time we picked our way through the multiplatform refuse of June '96 when we looked at Shellshock, Baku Baku Animal, Gungriffon, Creature Shock: Special Edition, Road & Track Presents The Need for Speed, and Road Rash.
Now our journey through the first half of 1996 is coming to an end as we look at Shockwave Assault, Shining Wisdom, Golden Axe: The Duel, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and Worms.
**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**
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Shockwave Assault
Developer: Paradox Development
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 6/25/1996
Time to Welcoming Our New Alien Overlords: 25 Minutes
Continuing the pain train from last week, we get to take one final look at Shockwave. I originally had a very unfavorable opinion of it in Part 012 of the PS1 series, back when I had standards, and pecked at what few crumbs remained in terms of commentary when looking at the original 3DO version. Now that EA has dumped their old multiplatform titles on the Saturn, I can now close the book on this thing. I have nothing more to add about the game that has not already been said. There might be something in trying to dissect the creative choices behind the game, but since it originally came out in the wake of Rebel Assault, it wouldn't be difficult to figure out. In fact, this thing came out the same year as Tie Fighter and Wing Commander III. I know they're not in the same exact genre, but the narrative-space-shooter thing was all the rage in '94. Dumbing the concept down would have made for a quick and easy console cash grab. I'm just spitballing at this point. This is like a warmed-over Sega CD game and I'm glad I'm done with it. Wait, did I say I was done? I meant to say that there was a sequel released for the 3DO that I will have to play at some point. That's right kids, the ride never ends.
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Shining Wisdom
Developer: Sonic! Software Planning
Publisher: Working Designs
Release Date: 6/26/1996
Time to Feeling 'Eepy: 100 Minutes
This is where I confess my, not really, dark secret: I've never played a Shining game before. Unless you count Beyond the Beyond, but that game doesn't count for anything. I'll have more to say on that topic in a few months. It looks like this is also an outlier in the Shining series, since those tend to either be Fire Emblem knockoffs or Dungeon Crawlers but this game is a full-throated Zelda-like. Well, it does have precisely one gimmick, but we'll get to that.
For anyone who's like I was and is innocent of the Shining franchise, here's a short summary. In 1990 a few members of the Dragon Quest development team left Enix and formed a couple of studios under Sega, Climax and Sonic! Software Planning. Before you ask, yes, it appears they named it after that Sonic. These new teams very quickly turned around and released an aggressively mid Wizardry-style dungeon crawler called Shining in the Darkness. Taking the basic world structure from that game, they rapidly began pumping out a series of Fire Emblem knockoffs under the Shining Force name. I don't use the word 'rapidly' without reason, since between the Genesis, Game Gear, and Sega CD they put out six games in about 39 months. Shining Wisdom would release about two months after the last Game Gear Shining Force entry and would shake up the formula by being a Link to the Past knockoff. Sonic! Would keep chugging along with a second attempt at a dungeon crawler and one last go at Shining Force before shutting down in '98 with the death of the Saturn.
The original founders of the studio got out during the generational transition and founded Camelot Software, putting out Beyond the Beyond on the PS1 at around the same time Shining Wisdom hit the Saturn. That first Camelot title is basically a Shining game in all but name, but that's a story for a different time. When their sister studio went belly up, Camelot landed under the Nintendo umbrella and has been making Mario Sports games ever since, which is the strangest possible outcome to their story. Meanwhile, Sega would revive the Shining franchise with various different developers during the PS2 era as C-tier Tales knockoffs. The latest entry being 2018's Shining Resonance Refrain, which I've heard described as, "that game with that one anime girl on the cover."
As mentioned earlier, Shining Wisdom is a blatant 2D Zelda clone. It's a top-down Action-Adventure game where you have a sword, special items, and an overworld dotted with puzzle dungeons. This could have been a Genesis game, and by all accounts it was originally going to be until Sega realized they needed to throw everything they had at the Saturn. There are two three main differences separating this from the archetypical 2D Zelda experience. First, there’s a lot more talking in this game. This developer was used to making plot-heavy Turn-Based Strategy games and the game engine was made for talking. Not that the characters, world, or overall writing are worth anything, but we'll get to that. Second, this thing is heavily concerned with its run mechanic. You have to fast tap the C button to build up speed, represented by a Super Mario Bro.'s 3 type meter, in order to move at a reasonable pace. This mechanic is also used for like half the traversal puzzles. The game really wants you to play this like an old Konami sports game and it's inexplicable.
That leads us to the third and most impactful difference. Shining Wisdom is poorly designed. From the very first screen of the game, everything feels badly thought out. From the deranged and questionably translated monologue by the player's grandfather in the opening, to the immediate demand to master the unexplained dashing mechanic in order to exit the first screen, to the fact that after that screen you need to traverse the overworld without a map or a weapon, everything going on here is badly considered. At some point you do gain a sword, but the game doesn't tell you and you have to just notice it in the inventory that you aren't given any reason to open until the end of the first dungeon. That led to me doing an accidental pacifist run for like the first 30 minutes of the game. The map layouts are uninspired, the puzzles aren't fun, and the boss fights are basic. When all of that is added to the impressively uncompelling story, you end up with a game which gives you no reason to experience it.
Not that this thing is kusoge or anything. There's a minimum of quality throughout and none of the bizarre choices make it unplayable. It's exceedingly mediocre with brief flashes of insanity. This is entirely due to the basic competence of the combat. It works exactly like you would expect from looking at it, nothing more and nothing less. It looks and sounds like a decent Sega CD game and runs well, which is the bare minimum considering it uses a previous-gen engine. The character sprites look weird and wrong, but that probably is the only thing making it memorable. This isn't bad enough to be interesting and not good enough to be fun, which is probably why I hadn't heard of it before now.
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Golden Axe: The Duel
Developer: Sega
Publisher: Sega
Release Date: 6/27/1996
Time to Knifed By An Elf (Not A Euphemism?): 27 Minutes
Now for another classic franchise that I don't really know what to do with. I have precisely zero attachment to Golden Axe since I never knew what Genes-is as a child and only ever experienced what Ninten-does. I've probably poked around with it as an adult, but it left no lasting impression of any kind, to the point that I regularly confuse it with Altered Beast. That means I came into this thing with no brand familiarity whatsoever and thus no reason to care.
So, apparently there were a bunch of Golden Axe games? That's news to me, and it looks like The Duel was the last thing done with the series in the 90's. I suppose there's a certain appropriateness in playing this back-to-back with Shining Wisdom. Both are genre outliers in their franchises that weren't good enough to go anywhere. Yet I digress, this thing is a 2D Fighting game originally released to Japanese arcades in 1995. Failing to port an arcade Fighting game to international markets doesn't set up the console version for success, though that might not have mattered in this case. This is an offensively middling Fighting game. It moves poorly, the characters aren't interesting, the specials aren't compelling, and the potion system to fill the special meter doesn't make sense. While streaming it, I was informed by helpful degenerates genre fans that this thing is basically a lazy Street Fighter II re-skin. This would have been in the bargain bin of arcade Fighting games in the mid 90's.
Not that the conversion is bad. This is the Saturn, so of course this 2D Fighting game runs immaculately. This is the first time I would call this kind of quality workmanship a wasted effort. I mean, I liked Dark Legend and that game is probably even more forgotten than this one. This is such a nothing game. The only character I remember is the serial killer knife elf, and that's only because his fight is where I got stuck on the singleplayer ladder. I think the series villain is playable? Is his name Gigadeath or something? I'm not going to look it up, that's how little I care about Golden Axe. I'm not even interested enough to write an outro line for this review.
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Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Developer: Eurocom
Publisher: Williams
Release Date: 6/27/1996
Time to THE DIFFICULTY SETTINGS DO NOTHING: 12 Minutes
When I played the PS1 port of vanilla Mortal Kombat 3 all the way back in Part 005 of that series, I held out hope that UMK3 would be more playable when I eventually got to it. Whelp, turns out I was as overly optimistic as usual. Though, I made it further than I did with the Saturn version of Mortal Kombat II. The inherent problem with these early MK games is that they are not meant to be played in singleplayer, which is what I insist on doing. They were expressly designed for two players standing within punching distance to play against each other. The fight ladder is there for either showing off, high level practice, or to separate suckers from their quarters. That design mentality translates poorly to consoles. I'm pretty sure I've harped on this before, so I'll spare you the rest. Really, I'm just trying to justify why I have absolutely nothing to say about this experience. I guess I would recommend this over MKII or MK3, which may or may not be a hot take.
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Worms
Developer: Team17
Publisher: Ocean Software
Release Date: 6/27/1996
Time to Low Effort Gags: 37 Minutes
Last but, somehow, not least we have Worms. Not the one you've played, that was probably some variant of Worms Armageddon. This is the first one. The one originally released on the Amiga, which is as big a red flag as we can encounter. Yet, inexplicably, this is one of the better Amiga ports we've seen thus far in our journey. I'm probably getting ahead of myself.
Worms was the brainchild of a random British guy named Andy Davidson, who seemed to have developed the original version while messing around with Amiga programming in the early 90's. After shopping his prototype to various publishers, he caught the interest of Team17, whose early history I won't go into because it confuses me. The original gist seems to have been based on taking gameplay concepts from the defunct "Artillery Game" genre, adding the UI from Lemmings, and throwing in some very basic humor. Maybe I'm being unfair about the humor, since referential comedy was mostly acceptable before Seth MacFarlane ran that genre into the ground. Either way, the little worm guys are kinda wacky and say short jokes or references in high-pitched voices.
You might have also noticed that I put "Artillery Game" in sneer quotes. I guess this was a thing back in the 80's, when games where two players throw simple physics objects across terrain would have seemed advanced. I haven't heard of any of the examples I've seen, with the Worms franchise being exponentially more successful or recognizable than any of its conceptual predecessors. I feel weird describing the Worms gameplay loop, but some people might not have ever seen one so here it goes. Different teams of anthropized worms are dropped into a procedurally generated 2D stage with the objective of killing each other and the last team with any members remaining wins. Each team has a wide arsenal of weapons, including a variety of guns, grenades, rocket launchers, bombs, and other miscellaneous junk. Each individual worm takes turns moving and attacking with the uncertain trajectories, severe fall damage, and destructible terrain adding all of the uncertainty to individual actions. Each worm has its own health values, and ammo is pooled within each team. That covers everything, really. It's a simple game that is complicated by the intended chaos and match settings.
That gets me to the crux of the problem with pretty much every entry in this franchise: these games are meant for multiplayer. You're supposed to have one player per worm team, and the chaos is supposed to inspire jests and jeers among groups of friends. This formula works well for that, and basically nothing else. The singleplayer component of these things only ever captures a fraction of the fun. A lot of that comes down to opposing AI, who either gang up on you, make trick shots, or are otherwise better than you at the game. This original entry is bad about this, but it doesn't get that much better in the sequels. So, aside from the corny humor, this would be the biggest problem.
Also, this is still a console port of an Amiga game. The gameplay screen is completely screwed, with a less than useful lower third taking up space while you have to scroll in four directions around the screen, and there isn't enough room to fully fit the team health bars without scrolling. You navigate with a d-pad cursor, which is unforgivable in this context. It doesn't look or sound particularly good either. Interacting with this thing on a Saturn controller is actively awful. This game is janky and crusty even by the standards of the time, and it's an actively unpleasant experience because of that. Even still, the basic appeal is there, fully formed in this first iteration of the core gameplay loop. Everything somehow balances out to middling, which makes this the best Amiga port I've seen so far? I don't even harbor any ill-will towards this thing or its creators, even though I should. That's the highest praise I'm willing to give.
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That ends the first half of 1996 for the Saturn. I feel like I've made the out with a bang/whimper joke too many times, so I'll just express relief that we're going to jump back to PS1 soon. Let's update the Ranking of All Saturn Games and bounce.
1. Panzer Dragoon II Zwei
…
36. Shining Wisdom
55. Worms
65. Golden Axe: The Duel
68. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
73. Shockwave Assault
…
95. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Now that we're done with the first half of '96, we're going to stop and look back at this brief heyday of the system the next time we return with this series.
Before then, we're going to hop back over to 1994 with the Atari Jaguar to look at their second batch of releases from that year: Checkered Flag, Club Drive, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and Doom.
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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 PS1 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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