An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time we looked at the October '95 lineup of 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.
This week we will look at the games released for the Saturn in the first two weeks of November 1995: Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition, The Mansion of Hidden Souls, Rayman, Theme Park, NBA Jam: Tournament Edition, and Virtua Cop.
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Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition
Release Date: 11/2/1995
Developer: Digital Pictures
Publisher: Digital Pictures
Time to Zombification: 38 Minutes
We're starting this show off with a showstopper, and by that, I mean this is the campiest thing I've seen in a while. I was not sufficiently warned before going in that I would be grappling with one of the cheesiest FMV games ever made. That alone should make Corpse Killer my favorite game on the Saturn, but the act of playing this thing is a chore. Let's start at the beginning.
Corpse Killer is a Light Gun Shooter originally released for the Sega CD in 1994. The tone and quality of the game should be made obvious just from uttering the name of its development studio: Digital Pictures. They were the hare-brained FMV hucksters responsible for Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and the Make My Video series among others. Personally, I would call them the protagonists of the Sega CD era. There must be a book out there covering their story, but I'm too lazy of a googler to find it. They also seem to have put significant effort into porting their later games to the Saturn, so this isn't the last we shall see of them.
Even with that background, it isn't possible to be prepared for the experience found in this game. The premise is that you play as some American soldier guy who gets airdropped along with his bros onto a tropical zombie island with the mission of killing the mad scientist who's making the zombies. The airdrop goes awry, and your voiceless character gets separated from his guys, who're all immediately captured anyway. Lt. Protagonist is rescued by some Jamaican guy in a jeep, and they speed away. Note that the Jamaican guy, Winston, is played by someone who is probably not Jamaican but is going for it the best he can anyway. After a few seconds of gameplay, the pair meet up with Julie, who is totally a journalist and not a model trying to get an acting credit. I guess Julie hired Winston as her guide on the island? I lost the plot a bit.
Fortunately, the rest of that plot is just to storm through the bad guy's compound and rescue the other army guys who have all been zombified. Fortunately, named characters can have their zombification reversed by the extract of a voodoo plant that the game swears isn't just ginger root. You must storm the compound four times for some reason and then fight the final boss. There are some side cutscenes revealing a bit of backstory, a couple of side missions with Winston and Julie, and frequent interludes where you get smack-talked by the bad guy. Speaking of that bad guy, his name is DR. HELLMAN, which should have been used in a better campy horror story than this one. This guy is played by a genuine character actor, Vincent Schiavelli (RIP), who goes so much harder into that role than he needed to. On a final note about the story, the usage of voodoo magic as a crutch is very iffy, bordering on a full yikes. Casually throwing around Voodoo as shorthand for evil magic is bad in any time period, so I'm not giving these writers a pass for being in the 90's. Casual racism is something that sadly needs to be confronted when delving into campy horror. And campy this is, intentionally so from the look of the opening credits. Horror connoisseurs, which I'm not, must address the racial implications of old, bad horror media. Though, the place for that isn't here or now.
What is meant for the here and now is a discussion of the shit-ass gameplay in this video game. It should be known to anyone reading this that playing light-gun games with a d-pad sucks. Corpse Killer does not escape that trend. Moving the cursor around and shooting feels bad, and I had to look up the game manual to figure out the convoluted control scheme. This isn't even the biggest problem, which is that I never found a consistent way to heal. There are apparently supposed to be health pick-ups in each level but I sure as hell(man) never collected them. This led to me suffering attrition until my death on both the attempts that I made at this game. There is only one life per playthrough, so when your health goes to zero that's it. This proved to be an insurmountable hurdle, which is quite sad. The unreasonable difficulty doesn't seem intentional, and the rotoscoped sprites during the gameplay are hilarious enough that I would have wanted to see more.
I am sorely disappointed about this game being unplayable, as I can always enjoy cheesy nonsense. Well, I can usually enjoy cheesy nonsense, as we are about to see.
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The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Release Date: 11/2/1995
Developer: System Sacom
Publisher: Sega
Time to Looking At A Guide: 20 Minutes
Time to Restarting: 25 Minutes
Time to The End: 100 Minutes
I'm pretty sure this game broke me. I have made it through so much insane nonsense and hatefully bad games, but this innocuous piece of nothing has broken me. I don't know what to say, think, or feel about The Mansion of Hidden Souls.
Let's begin with the basics and see if we can get anywhere. This is the sequel to the 1993 Sega CD game of the same name. Even that small detail is cause for confusion. The two games have unique titles in Japan, but Sega must've thought to try to reboot the original with this sequel for the western release. That was an awful idea, as this entry is missing some necessary context about what is even going on with the setting. So, we haven't even gotten into it and this thing is already a headache for video game archivists.
The mansion in question seems to exist outside of normal reality and is populated with random people who have been transformed into ageless butterflies. It's like The 7th Guest if the ghosts were represented by flying insects, and if there was no murder, and if the characters were undeveloped…and if there was no horror of any kind. Anyway, the original game involves playing as a boy whose sister accidentally stumbles upon the mansion and gets turned into a butterfly. That boy goes through a short adventure game to rescue his sister and escape the mansion. The main thing to take away is that being an eternal butterfly is a sad and undesirable fate. This sequel carries over none of the characters of the original and reworks all the rooms. The only thing carried over is the central hallway and the basic layout.
The story in this one involves a tensionless mystery among nine butterflied ghosts who are living in the mansion. Because everyone has already been captured by the mansion and are just chilling out as butterflies, there's none of the tension or attempted existential horror of the original. The plot, such as it is, revolves around one of the characters causing trouble and the player needing to figure out who it is and thwart their plans. You can figure out who the villain is within five minutes, but the game is structured like an old choose-your-own-adventure book, so you need to go through the specific intended events to get anywhere. Other than the incredibly bizarre ending that makes a half-hearted swing at cosmic horror, there is nothing of any interest going on with the narrative.
That's a shame, because the premise is weird, and the gameplay is as close to non-existent as possible while still being a video game. You use the d-pad to move around to the various rooms and look at things. Sometimes the things you look at are objects that can be added to a simple inventory, or those objects are actually the locations of another character who then talks at you. The branching points in the choose-your-own-adventure are made by answering either 'yes' or 'no' with the A and C buttons when a character asks you a question. Sometimes the branching path takes you to a fail state, sometimes it makes you restart the conversation, or sometimes it doesn't matter. The vast majority of these yes-or-no questions have obvious answers, so there is little risk of failure. That is the entirety of the gameplay. You walk between the various rooms, looking at things until you trigger a new conversation or find an item, which then allows you to move forward with the story and repeat the process. Most of the time it isn't obvious who you need to talk to, so you end up making the rounds talking to everyone. Somehow, with so little in the way of controls the game still manages to feel incredibly sluggish and unresponsive. Nothing about the way this plays or is designed could be described as good or interesting.
If you broadly know what you're doing, the game takes less than an hour to complete, and there is no replay value. Maybe because of this, the game starts you out with no explanation for itself or how you should interact with it. I originally started it on Standard difficulty, and I was completely lost. There are no onscreen prompts for anything, and I kept thinking that there had to be an interact button of some kind. Also, it seemed like there was no consistency to which buttons did what during conversations. I completely fumbled around for about 20 minutes, making minimal progress as I kept failing the conversations. This was infuriating, but I needed to know just what in the hell was going on. I had to look up both the game manual and a Gamefaqs guide to figure this thing out. After the fog of inscrutability was lifted, all difficulty was gone. I restarted the game on Easy, which seems to only make the timing for the question prompts more consistent, and poked through to the end in 75 minutes. I saw a bunch of non-critical content along the way, so it could be considered a high completion run. When I say there's very little going on here, I mean it.
There are other points to make. The slightly unnerving talking butterflies of the original are replaced by floating CG heads for each of the characters, which is so much worse. Those floating heads have no lip sync and are badly animated, even by 1995 standards. Not that the dialogue is worth lip-syncing. The writing is both bad and badly localized, as can be expected, and the voice acting is universally abysmal. Not even the kind of abysmal that is funny or entertaining as such; this is the kind of bad that is sad and tiring. Then there's that ending. It couldn't make less sense if it tried. The CG god-beings look awful and more plot happens in the last five minutes than the entire game beforehand, not that it matters for much. The story begins with a bunch of butterfly ghosts (or ghost butterflies) innocuously hanging out in a mansion that is smaller on the inside than the outside, and it ends with slightly fewer butterflies hanging out in that same mansion. I don't know how else to put it. This game even has fewer environments than the original, too. This is literally a lesser game than the first one, and you don't see that happen often with game sequels.
I'm at a loss. I don't have thoughts or feelings on this thing; there is a void where those should be. I feel nothing. When that self-important jerk Nietzsche wrote of staring into the abyss, I'm pretty sure he was referring to The Mansion of Hidden Souls, and it stares back with unemotive CG faces. This game is artistically empty, and it's the best argument for Nihilism that I've ever seen.
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Rayman
Release Date: 11/3/1995
Developer: Ubisoft Montpellier
Publisher: Ubisoft
Time to Still Blaming The French: 24 Minutes
The surest way to jolt me out of the funk caused by that last game is for me to get splashed in the face with a bucket of cold piss. In other words, to play Rayman. I was hoping that having a whole entire CPU and GPU devoted to 2D processing would do something to this game. Nope. It's Rayman.
I still want this game to be good because of my fond feeling towards Rayman Origins, and the pain of playing this thing fades with time, so playing it again was a rude reminder. The Saturn version looks and sounds pretty much the same as the PS1 version, but it seems to somehow control worse. Maybe I'm imagining things. Either way, all my previous complaints still stand, so here's some screenshots with snarky comments:
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Theme Park
Release Date: 11/8/1995
Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Time to I'd Rather Play Rollercoaster Tycoon: 40 Minutes
While we're on the subject of games that are basically the same here as they are on the PS1, we now need to talk about Theme Park. There is no real difference in the performance of this game between the two consoles, though I find the Saturn controller set-up to be a bigger hassle than the PS1 controller. There shouldn't be much of a difference in button assignments, as the only physical difference is that the PS1 has the two extra buttons as bumpers instead of on the face. Yet, the controls somehow feel worse in all three of this week's multi-platform games. It's probably in my head.
There are three differences in my experience this time compared my first foray in the PS1 version:
- I now appreciate the performance of the on-screen cursor and menus in this game after being subjected to the horrors of other PC ports. This is as snappy and responsive as these things got in 1995. What a tragedy.
- I have looked up why the barfing sounds happen. Apparently, it's an audio cue to draw attention to the lack of bathroom facilities. I had a hard time figuring out where the toilets were in the build menu last time, but this time I built an assload of outhouses and hired too man handymen to keep them clean. I was able to get through this run with a minimum of up-chucking.
- Most importantly, this time I've been able to give more attention to scrutiny the dearth of quality-of-life features that we would now expect from this genre. It's excusable with this game, being the first, but it's frustrating to not have the ability to rotate buildings, pause, auto-restock store inventory, or any number of other quibbles. I was also able to more closely consider the demented warehousing mechanic and the almost impenetrable screen for managing park ownership. Half the information screens suck, there's no place to centrally manage prices, and important sub-screens are tucked away in random places. This all leads to the game not being particularly fun once you get going with it, even though it was probably fine by the standards of the time.
Anyway, here's some more screenshots:
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NBA Jam: Tournament Editon
Release Date: 11/10/1995
Developer: Midway
Publisher: Acclaim Entertainment
Time to Still Not Knowing How To Play This Game: 20 Minutes
I've been through a lot since I first touched NBA Jam: Tournament Edition all the way back in Part 003 of the PS1 series. In that time, I have not gotten any better at basketball games. I also forgot how to dunk the ball, whoops. Regardless of that, this version is still very much NBA Jam: TE, though I swear the controls are worse here than on the PS1. I'm pretty sure it's psychosomatic at this point. That's a big-worded way of saying I somehow did so much worse this time than before. That's right, I've gotten worse at this game, and I don't know why. My own crises aside, there is nothing new I can say about this game specifically.
Broadly, this franchise is weird. I am just now looking at it seriously, and I can't tell what was going on behind the scenes at Midway. The original NBA Jam was apparently the spiritual sequel to the 1989 game Arch Rivals, which I had never heard of. After the release of Tournament Edition, this franchise seems to have been split up between Midway and Acclaim. The Midway games had to change the name but kept the gameplay, while Acclaim got the name and apparently used it for yearly Game Boy releases. This is a new bit of game history for me, and it looks insane on its face. If anyone knows about any kind of tell-all book or article about Midway in the 90's, let me know because there are going to be like five more of these things in the future and I'll need to fill space.
Oh, and if you're curious make sure to ask @marino about the greatness of Mookie Blaylok.
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Virtua Cop
Release Date: 11/14/1995
Developer: AM2
Publisher: Sega
Time to AVCAB: 28 Minutes
Finally, we arrive at the first big Sega game of November with this console port of the seminal 1994 arcade light gun game. This thing is notable for being the first fully polygonal rail shooter, and one of the most successful arcade games of its time. The polygonal graphics are what qualify it for the Virtua moniker, and (I think) it's the last series to receive that naming. For Sega's purposes, the original arcade release of Virtua Cop did exactly what it set out to do and did it well.
This is a highly accurate arcade port that runs smoothly despite being a polygonal Saturn game. Everything about the look, sound, movement, and basic design represents the best of this genre for its time. It even seems like it was cleaned up a little bit in the year between the original release and this port, so maybe this is a superior version…with the correct interface.
That last point is the main one here. This is a console port and thus plays with a d-pad. I know that this game had robust peripheral support to give players the ability to use literally anything other than the d-pad, but I'm playing it with an emulator 27 years later so what do you want from me. Maneuvering an onscreen cursor to play this thing cuts the experience off at the knees and elbows. Getting that pointer around the screen is a massive chore, and the sensitivity and difficulty settings only alleviate the pain a little bit. This suffers the problem of the cursor being either not sensitive enough to get around the screen in time to shoot enemies or so sensitive that shots can't get accurately lined up on smaller targets. Either way, things like the thrown projectiles are largely unmanageable. There's no good way to play this game without some kind of peripheral, which means there's no good way for most modern people to play it.
Though, I don't know if we're missing very much. The base game has three levels, each divided into three sections and a boss fight. I poked around and saw roughly half the total content in less than half an hour. That's very little to have going on. Also, because this is an arcade light-gun game, there's basically no story of any kind and the replayability lies solely in score seeking. A small shooting range mode has been added for this version, but it adds extremely little to the experience. This would have been a very steep ask at full price, even by the standards of a mid-90's console game.
Lastly, I can't stop myself from talking about the premise. Cop-based action movies were ubiquitous in the '80's and '90's, and nothing going on in this game strays far from those tropes. If anything, this would have been an unremarkable subject of a shoot-'em-up game. Yet, with our powers of hindsight, it is glaringly obvious that having a game where you play as a cop gunning down hundreds of nameless goons is problematic. The game even leans into it by having one of the player characters nicknamed "Rage". Old cop fiction cultivated a kind of mainstream permissiveness towards police violence, the bloodied fruits of which the U.S. has been reaping for a while now. Virtua Cop played a negligible role in that cultural frog-boiling, but it is an artifact of that time and needs to be noted as such.
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Between the schlock, clumsy police brutality, Rayman, and a severe cognitohazard I have to say that the first two weeks of November '95 continued to be a bad time for American Saturn owners. I am more than happy to move on from these games, but first let's see how they place in the Ranking of All Saturn Games:
1. Panzer Dragoon
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9. Virtua Cop
14. NBA Jam: Tournament Edition
17. Theme Park
19. Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition
24. Rayman
…
29. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
The pain train continues next time with Part 2 of November '95, as we look at the next week of releases. Though, maybe I should call this All Digital Pictures Games In Order since we will be looking at: Dark Legend, Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka, Sega Rally Championship, Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators, Double Switch, and Ghen War.
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