An explanation of what I'm doing here can be found in my introduction post.
Last time we looked at the second part of November '95 with Dark Legend, Quarterback Attack With Mike Ditka, Sega Rally Championship, Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators, Double Switch, and Ghen War.
This time we will look at the games released for the Saturn in the last week of November 1995: High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge, V.R. Virtua Racing, Solar Eclipse, Galactic Attack, and Virtua Fighter 2.
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High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge
Release Date: 11/24/1995
Developer: Cave
Publisher: Atlus
Time to Stuck in 4th Gear: 28 Minutes
It took me longer than I would care to admit remembering why I recognized Cave as a developer name. For everyone like me, these are the Bullet Hell people. Cave has made and continues to make a metric buttload of 'shmups of the screen-full-of-death variety. In 1995, they were a brand-new studio and had not yet fully realized their calling, so they produced games in a variety of genres. That said, there's a reason why Cave didn't become a racing developer.
Where do I even start with this thing. High Velocity, or the better Touge: King of Spirits in Japan, is a 1v1 street racing game set in the mountains of Japan that has three tracks, six cars, and some real hutzpah for trying to pass off this driving model. This might be the worst driving system that I have yet to encounter on either the Saturn or the PS1. Not only is the drifting completely whacked, but the basic steering and braking feel off as well. The worst part is the transmission. You don't see that complaint very often, and this is the first time I've had an issue with the automatic/manual transmission option in a game. This isn't so much something you choose from a menu as it is something that is toggled during the race. Every race starts with your transmission set to manual, and you must turn on automatic with the C button. The real kicker is that if you bounce off a wall hard enough (or if the game wants you to fuck yourself) the transmission switches back to manual. If you aren't paying attention to the gear select in the corner of the screen, you'll get stuck trying to accelerate at low speed while in 4th gear or something equally stupid. This mechanic might be the most psychotic thing I have ever seen in a driving game.
Adding to that psychotic feeling, there's the sound. Some of the songs feel like the composer for this game listened to the Ridge Racer music and thought it wasn't unhinged enough. Then there's the sound effects. I rarely comment on sound effects in games because even bad games can do that part well enough. The cars in this game straight-up sound bad, and the collision sounds are some of the most pathetic things I've ever heard. No matter the angle or speed with which you hit anything, the same mild *thump* sound is played. It might not be that much worse than in contemporary racers, but It's just noticeable enough that, as I was bouncing around the tracks, I couldn't not constantly notice it. Anyway, here's the wildest piece of music in the game, which will be what I hear if/when I suffer a mental breakdown:
Now I guess I have to say something nice about High Velocity: This thing looks alright for the time. Even though the polygons are unhappy, they're more stable than in Daytona USA or Cyber Speedway. Cave also pulled off the neat trick of avoiding pop-in during the races. They seem to have solved the perennial draw distance issues with this generation of games by making the racetracks simple, curvy, and mountainous. This means that the system never has to show anything further than it can draw. This is a clever solution that bears the trade-off of turning the play experience into a twisty fucker. The other nice thing is the amount of stuff to do in this thing. The main mode comprises 36 races, racing each of the six car types on each of the three tracks, forward and reverse. This will certainly keep you busy for a while, and I have to imagine that something unlocks when you beat them all. There's even two-player, which you can use to subtly let someone know that you don't want to be friends with them anymore.
So, this game is bad. But it's not soul-crushingly bad or infuriatingly bad. There's actually something charismatic about it that I find both attractive and troubling. Modern Cave should probably make another one of these where you must dodge complex patterns of projectiles while Tokyo Drift-ing around mountain roads. That's a free idea for anyone who wants it.
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V.R. Virtua Racing
Release Date: 11/24/1995
Developer: AM2 / Time Warner Interactive
Publisher: Time Warner Interactive
Time to OutRunning The Competition: 49 Minutes
Now for a real-ass VIDEO GAME. I need to admit up-front that knew nothing about this game or any of the everything around Virtua Racing coming into this thing. As such, my impressions come entirely from a place of ignorance on the history of Sega. But even with that, I at least know that it was the an extremely important and revolutionary arcade racing game. If you want to learn more than anyone should know about this thing, watch the PandaMonium doc on it.
That original 1992 arcade game featured three tracks, one car, and pre-madness Yu Suzuki's inspirational peripheral design. Sega would go on to port that game to the Genesis and 32X with varying levels of accuracy, and yet this is not that game. Apparently, this was rebuilt from scratch, for reasons, to evoke that original game. This also has important an additional mode and way more content than any other version, which goes a long way with me.
There are five very different cars ranging from a go-kart to the original F1 car. The Arcade Mode is what it is, but the Grand Prix mode exclusive to this release has you starting from the slowest vehicle and ranking up by earning tournament points in races across the ten tracks. The difficulty curve seems well-paced, and each track needs to be taken differently with each car type, so there's a ton of variation here compared to other racing games. The Grand Prix races are all ten laps, which can be a slog at the lower levels, but it makes the player learn the tracks and improve on lap times without beating the crap out of them. This alone makes this the best version of Virtua Racing in my mind, but there are reasons why that opinion could get me roughly handled in the wrong crowd.
First, the driving model is iffy. It's a breath of fresh air compared to High Velocity, but it is supposedly lesser than the original. I don't know enough to weigh-in on that debate, but it's fine after some adjusting. Another thing that doesn't help is how primitive the graphics are. The basic, textureless polygons are stone-aged compared to Sega Rally Championship, which came out on the Saturn in the same month as this game. This look is retro and cool these days, but in '95 it would've seemed woefully obsolete. Which brings us to the biggest problem, the music. Either I downloaded a borked-up rip of this game, or this thing has no music during the race. There are short stingers that play when you pass the checkpoints, but the time between is filled only with the monotonous engine noise. This becomes an issue when playing through back-to-back ten lap races.
My own biggest takeaway is a revelation that I had while playing this, which probably won't mean much to anyone else. The way crashes are animated and recovered from in this game set off a lightbulb in my head. This thing is designed and plays like a scaler racer. It makes sense, being one of the first 3D racing games ever made, but I was still struck by how the game design here has the bones of a sprite-based racing game. It seems to me that Virtua Racing has more in common with OutRun than Ridge Racer. I could be writing out my own butt with that, but I feel like I just found an evolutionary missing link. Though I'm probably the last person to the party with that realization.
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Solar Eclipse
Release Date: 11/27/1995
Developer: Crystal Dynamics
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Time to More Like Total Eclipse Of The Fart: 37 Minutes
This game is probably better than I'm going to give it credit for. Despite the psychological violence Crystal Dynamics has put me through ever since I first laid eyes on Total Eclipse Turbo back in Part 004 of the PS1 series, I didn't feel animosity towards them until now. The reason for my, now eternal, enmity is because of the ad for Crystal Dynamics' 32-bit line-up included in this game under the Preview option on the main menu. I made the mistake of watching it, so now you have to as well:
I can't quite find the words for why I hated this so much. Even though the video is around three minutes, it felt like the longest ten minutes of my life. I really should have left and come back later to this game after watching that video, but I continued forward in an uncharitable mood.
Even with that, I need to admit that the production values in this game are a massive improvement over Total Eclipse or any other Crystal Dynamics games we've looked at so far. That makes sense as this is newly made for the Saturn and not a 3DO port. I'm also not too broken up that the narrative in this sequel has nothing to do with what little plot there was in Total Eclipse. The story here follows the initial reaction and eventual resistance to an alien invasion of the solar system. The cutscenes follow the crew of a barely non-infringing Babylon 5 looking spaceship. That non-infringement even extends to Claudia Christian being cast as the ship's captain, because why make something original and worthwhile when you can just allude to other, better, pieces of media.
So, the FMV is passable in the way that a forgotten Sci-fi Channel original movie could be passable. That's an improvement over the Zito-flavored cheesefests that consoles had been getting up to now, but this isn't a TV movie, and we have to eventually play the damn thing. The gameplay is a space Rail Shooter like its predecessor, and slightly improves on it in every way. Though, it would be tricky to do worse than Total Eclipse.
The biggest improvement is the absence of the dodgy tunnel sections from the first game. Those things had no redeeming value and won't be missed. Next, because this game has characters in it, you get wingmen and wingwomen who constantly pop-up in the bottom corner and chatter at you with context as if this were Space Griffon or something. That could be annoying for some, but in my opinion, it keeps things from getting too boring. There is, of course, a moderate graphical improvement with better skyboxes, terrain, ships, and even a few environmental effects thrown in. The health and power-up mechanics are more complex than in the first game, which makes it more engaging to manage. Finally, and most importantly, the bullet sizes are now reasonable in relation to what you're supposed to shoot.
Yet, even with all these improvements, the gameplay experience is still mediocre. Weaving around narrow canyons in a rail shooter can be engaging for about five minutes, but it gets real old really quick. The most fun I had was in the first part of the second level where you have to dodge around an asteroid field. Being able to use the whole screen space for movement was refreshing, but also highlighted the constriction of the planetary sections. This thing also feels significantly harder than the first one. While I almost made it halfway through Total Eclipse Turbo, I got a game over here before reaching the second boss. There are saves between missions, which is a sight better than a password system, but this game still isn't fun enough to justify the slog. So, two steps forward and one-and-a-half steps back.
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Galactic Attack
Release Date: 11/29/1995
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Acclaim
Time to Out Of Credits: 15 Minutes
There's not a lot going on in this one. Like with Jupiter Strike on the PS1, Taito seems to have thrown to market the nearest scrolling shooter they had at hand for the American holiday season. This is a port of the 1994 arcade game RayForce, which wasn't particularly notable for either positive or negative reasons. The Saturn version is, well, very similar in that regard.
Galactic Attack/Layer Section/RayForce is a top-down Shoot 'Em Up with mundane power-ups and enemy designs. This is also one of those 'shmups where you can bomb stuff in the scrolling background, though in this game you use a lock-on laser to do that. The scrolling is smooth, the music is alright, and the sprites are nice and detailed. It's about as difficult as you would expect for a game of this genre and vintage. This is also very immediately obvious as an arcade port, as there are extremely limited options and no other game modes. That's it. Y'all every play Gradius? Xevious? Raiden? Twin Bee? Any video game ever? This is one of those.
But there is one thing that's stuck in my craw. It's been a while since I last popped off about this, and it bears infinite repeating. Giving the player limited credits in the home version of an arcade game is inarguable bullshit. This game gives you four credits for the whole game. That would be worth either $1 or $2 USD in an arcade. I got about a third of the way through the game with that. Back in the day, you could walk into an arcade, break a ten, and beat this game with cash to spare. This is worse than The Raiden Project, where you could at least set a variable number of credits up to nine. Shelling out full console price for an arcade game that barely even lets you play it is a joke. Anyone who bought this was either already obsessively playing the thing in arcades, in which case they wouldn't even need four credits, or they were a fucking dupe that was born the day before. The thing feels like a scam, and it's the best argument for pirating arcade games. They're barely using any of the controller buttons, so what was keeping any of these developers from assigning "add credit" to the L or R buttons and letting the player decide on the level of challenge? Anyone who buys the home version has already paid for 100 - 200 credits anyway, so you might as well let them play the damn thing. There's no good reason for these games to get released this way, and it greatly discourages me from taking this genre seriously.
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Virtua Fighter 2
Release Date: 11/30/1995
Developer: AM2
Publisher: Sega
Time to Virtually Out-Fought: 33 Minutes
We've finally arrived at Sega's big release of the year, and the main killer app for the Saturn. This is the game that moved so many Saturns in Japan, and in the tight competition with Sony this thing needed to be a hit big. The long-term future of Sega's hardware business hinged on this game beating Tekken in the worldwide home market. That's a tall order, since Tekken is the unofficially canonical PS1 Game of 1995. This is the season finale of the Saturn and everything afterward is filler (though you should still read the next post anyway). So, how is Virtua Fighter 2? It's ok, I guess.
Ending the trilogy of Virtua Fighter Saturn ports, begun by the pack-in of VF1 and the mail-to-order VF Remix, we now have the soon-to-be packed-in VF2. This is probably the most options-rich arcade port that we have yet seen. Not only is there the base arcade ladder, but a variety of other single- and two-player modes added to it. Also, being an accurate conversion of a Model 2 game, the graphics are heavily improved from both the original and Remix. There are two new characters and dynamic environmental effects in addition to all those modes. The only tangible complaint is that the characters themselves feel lacking in personality, probably because of a lack of arcade endings. Still, this was clearly the best Virtua Fighter game of its time, and yet, I didn't enjoy my time with it.
I'm not sure why, but I didn't have anywhere near as much of a feel for this game as I thought I would, having just recently played the previous two entries. The grabs and special moves felt way more inconsistent than in VF Remix, or maybe there's just different timing and distances involved that I didn't put in enough time to figure out. The continue system and options are still generous, but I wasn't compelled to use them that much because I didn't enjoy playing it as much as the other entries. It's kind of inexplicable, because this seems to have been universally hailed as the best fighting game of its era. It looks good, it sounds good, and the animations are both smooth and believable. Yet, I wasn't feeling it. Here's a small example, in one of the fights there was an occurrence where I threw a basic punch and the AI character smoothly ducked under that punch, grabbed my guy's arm and flipped him over. That two-second exchange looked physically believable and not like a canned animation, which is a technical marvel for a game in the mid-90's. But you might notice that I was the one who got worked over in that example, and that's the rub.
This doesn't feel like an 'easy to learn, hard to master' kind of game, but instead a 'you know what you're doing or have a bad time' kind of game. I've had more fun in single-player with mid-tier fighting games like Dark Legend or shit-tier ones like Primal Rage. In that respect, VF2 is like Tekken, only more so. Which is a shame, as this is the best-looking 3D-fighting game of its time and is the most feature rich. I know that at some point in the late-90's or ealry-00's, this genre alienated mainstream audiences and was forced into dormancy for a while. This game feels like it's taken the first step on that path, as I'm sure anyone who already knew how to play these things competitively had an absolute blast, but fuck starting off with this game.
That takes us to the crowning of a champion for this round in the Sega/Namco war. International and domestic critics at the time were near-universal in their preference for VF2 over Tekken, so it looks like Sega won over the grognards. For the general gaming public, we can only look at sales figures. In Japan, VF2 easily beat Tekken in sales with what seems to be and extraordinary 100% attach rate for Saturn consoles. Yet, in the English-speaking world, Tekken outsold VF2 in what looks to be a 3:2 ratio despite VF2 quickly becoming a pack-in title with the Saturn. It would be easy to look at that fact and say, "screw 'em. Scoreboard!" But it bears remembering that VF3 wouldn't hit home consoles until 1999 and get completely ignored in the west when it did, while the Tekken sequels would become international multi-million mega-hits in '96 and '98. A lot of this can be laid at the feet of Sega's criminal mismanagement of their home systems generally and Virtua Fighter specifically, but it bears remembering that Namco eventually wins the war on all fronts. It's my intuition that people purchase sequels based on their enjoyment of the previous entries, and it can't be denied that Sega definitively took it on the chin with the Virtua Fighter sequels after this point. Make of this what you may.
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Well, this week was nowhere near as miserable as it could have been, so I'll consider that to be a belated Christmas present. Let's see where these games stand in the Ranking of All Saturn Games:
1. Panzer Dragoon
...
2. V.R. Virtua Racing
13. Virtua Fighter 2
17. High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge
27. Galactic Attack
28. Solar Eclipse
…
40. The Mansion of Hidden Souls
Now that we're officially done with November '95, we're going to sprint to the finish line by covering all eight December releases in one go. So, buckle up, because next time we'll close out the year by wading through the line-up of: Bases Loaded '96: Double Header, Center Ring Boxing, Gex, Valora Valley Golf (or, T&E Soft's Revenge), Hi-Octane, FIFA 96, Mystaria: The Realms of Lore, and finally Thunderstrike 2 for some reason.
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