32 Bits #6 and 7: WWF Wrestlemania and Air Combat

32 Bits is a series about how the popular games of the past influenced gaming today. We’re currently in September 1995, and the Playstation has just launched in North America.

Today we finish up the Playstation’s launch titles with Air Combat and move into October. On October 31st, 1995, Brad threw a Halloween party while Mark was sick on a brand-new Home Improvement, so I’d say it was a good month overall.

Playstation #6: WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game

Developed and published by Acclaim

Released: October 18, 1995

Best-Seller In: United States (Greatest Hits)

Professional wrestling is an odd beast, a mix of athleticism (of a kind) with theater. Yes, the fights are rigged. The storylines are elaborate and outsized. But those wrestlers up there are really getting hurt for your entertainment. It’s a strange, grand conflict even if you, like me, don’t care for it.

Sadly, the theatricality of wrestling was lost on games. For too long, games ignored storylines or large rosters in favor of awful fighting games that captured none of wrestling’s feel. WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game – developed by Acclaim (a strangely prestigious name for a company that made BMX XXX), and released for seemingly every console in 1995, Wrestlemania is…well, you can’t say it’s good.

The cast consists of a handful of wrestlers, though they’re animated with some life. More on that later. You will end up fighting yourself in the course of a season as the game keeps throwing tag teams at you.

That’s one of the few differences between WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game and Mortal Kombat, since Wrestlemania is clearly a…”homage”. The characters are similarly digitized and accorded magical powers. The Undertaker has the supernatural power to teleport across the ring and shoot fire. Pinning a character at the end of a match is treated like the command to “FINISH HIM!” at the end of a Mortal Kombat match.

Every character has supernatural powers, whether the powers are ghost based, fire-breathing or an electrical shock. It’s a layer of cartoon violence added to a conflict that is already based around over-the-top violence.

I’ll play many wrestling games this generation and most are, like this one, cheap cash-ins. At least the N64’s No Mercy added the now-standard create a wrestler mode, and 2000’s WWF Smackdown! captured the feel. But for a time in 1995, games like WWF Wrestlemania were all wrestling fans had, and that’s…just sad.

notes

• WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game won an award for “greatest facial expressions on a video game box”.

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Playstation #7: Air Combat

Developed and published by Namco

Released: September 9, 1995 (system launch)

Best-Seller in: US (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum), Japan (The Best)

I take the controller in hand. My plane is flying, steadily, far over the distant, solid green earth. “Break now!” urges my unfortunately talkative co-pilot.

I swerve to the right, seeking targets I can’t even see. I consult a small map. The skies are clear. A hazily detailed forest passes by below, though I am unconcerned with the ground.

My enemies enter view, distant dots highlighted with a red square by my auto-targeting. I fire a missile; my co-pilot screeches – a miss. Another missile connects; my target is destroyed in a distant blast.

I come under fire; I evade at high-speed, turning wildly. I could flee anywhere! The sky is literally the limit. Then I get disoriented. Blue is replaced with green, and my jet explodes as I hit the ground at full speed. Game over.

Well, fuck.

Flight games like Air Combat could not exist in two dimensions. Earlier attempts – Nintendo’s Pilotwings and Star Fox, and Sega’s Afterburner, utilized primitive 3D technology, false 3D, to replicate the feeling of openness. The freedom of flying is a primal feeling. It’s a dream games can fulfill. Unlike in a real plane, there’s no separation between plane and pilot. You are the plane.

Of course, Air Combat is hardly a rigorous sim. It’s the first game in Namco’s Ace Combat series, which I can’t say I’ve played before. The game seeks to excite.

Many levels are creative. Some work, others don’t.

The game’s urban levels take place at night. They ask you to take out guns in skyscrapers – approach while under fire, shoot the target, get away right before you collide with them. Or in my case, mostly collide with them.

A desert stage is huge and bare. You must take out multiple targets and your only guide from path to path is an oil pipe winding its way through the sands. In my case, I miss the pipes and hit the sand.

One of the late levels takes place on a chain of islands, with targets on each and deadly bridges connecting them. You must avoid them, or not in my case.

One level type that doesn’t work? Canyons. Theoretically, flying through narrow canyons should be intense. Instead, you move slowly through areas wide enough there’s no real danger. Your enemies are slow, hovering helicopters you can see from a mile away. These levels seek to create the same excitement as the others and instead induces boredom.

I could blather on about Air Combat’s creativity, but the reason people paid attention to it was the excitement. Many other games sought to replicate the feeling of games like this by being accurate. You could sell anything in 1996 if you slapped a real helicopter on the box. Air Combat succeeds because of the emotional reaction, the suspense, it produces. Everyone wants to fly; Air Combat let us.
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ELSEWHERE

What were the other Playstation launch titles like? Well…

The first two games released, according to contemporary site the Playstation Galleria, were from August and are now obscure: a shooter ported from the 3DO, Total Eclipse Turbo, and the self-explanatory Power Serve 3D Tennis. IGN described the latter as “visually stunning”, then says that the camera angles are rarely helpful and the game is sluggish. 2 out of 10 – “painful”. Total Eclipse Turbo earned 4 points out of 10 – merely “bad”, but not that bad, apparently.

Street Fighter: The Movie sought to capitalize on both the played-out Street Fighter frenzy of the early 90s and the much-maligned film; it replaced the arcade game’s lavish graphics with digitized sprites of the film’s stars. NBA Jam Tournament Edition, meanwhile, was NBA Jam.

Finally, we have one of the system’s few first person shooters. PC developers and gamers were in the midst of a Doom craze that touched the Playstation a bit, too. There was, obviously, the port of Doom I’ll play later in 1995. There was also Disruptor by Insomniac. Then there’s Kileak: The DNA Imperative, a game of walking down corridors and shooting robots. It earned a 3 out of 10 from IGN – “awful”, but not yet painful. Note how the trailer below displays no gameplay:

The months covered in this post, September and October, are singularly undistinguished; beyond a port of the great X-COM, gamers had to subside on Mortal Kombat and games with names like “Off World Interceptor Extreme”. But in November, the Playstation would become interesting again – and we’ll regroup there after a little diversion…
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An observer in 1995 would be wondering, “which of these games is the future of gaming?”

Of course, the future of gaming was the internet, which was rarely a factor this generation. And besides, the state of gaming’s future, if we look at it from a perspective of games and not technology, will always be the same. There will be many games in the future. Many familiar to us, others new. Only a few will be worth playing.

But imagine you are someone in 1995. Your first thought is, “why are cell phones so big? Why is the internet so slow? How long will it be before Rachel and Ross get back together?” But after all those thoughts, you might think “so what’s the future of gaming”?

Is it Ridge Racer? It’s shiny and new. But too few games would copy its reliance on little details to bring its world to life.

Is it Rayman? Despite the rules of Sony and Sega executives, old styles of games would proliferate throughout this generation.

Is it ESPN Extreme Games? Fuck no.

Of course, if you were living in 1995 you would know the Playstation wasn’t first. There was another console, one I ignored completely throughout these first posts. Turns out there was another console that came out in May 1995. Who knew?

Sega’s Saturn was meant to come out at the same time as the Playstation. Instead, Sega announced at the first E3 that the Saturn would be immediately available, nationwide. This gave them a quick lead for about a day, and then killed their console’s chances of success.

See, developers were not happy at the news that the games they were working on for September were now late. Since the Saturn was already hard to develop for, this made some developers swear off the console.

Retailers were not happy due to the lack of advertising. And finally, Sony announced the next day that not only would their console have far more third-party support, it would be cheaper than the Saturn. Sega’s quick grasp for attention killed their console.

But the Saturn wasn’t dead. In the absence of any kind of popularity or profitability, the Saturn developed into something unique – a console for cult hits, one with a library of misfits and oddballs. Revisiting the Saturn is to take a tour through the dead-ends, oddities and obscurities of gaming, a good counterpart to my “nothing but the hits” approach to the Playstation and Nintendo 64.

And next Sunday the tour – why, the tour is in a KB Toys near you right now! This’ll make us winners for sure!
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Sunday: The Saturn – Panzer Dragoon; Daytona USA; Virtua Fighter

Wednesday, March 6th: Sega answers criticism with Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition and Virtua Fighter Remix; Battle Arena Toshinden rears its head again with Battle Arena Toshinden Remix.

Then a brief break before we return with Twisted Metal and Tekken.