Playstation Racing on Highways and in Formula 1

Today: I play an early street racing game and fail at Formula 1.

32 Bits is a series where I play and review the most popular console games of the past – the games that sold well in their day, not what we look back on fondly now. Why were they popular, what did their success mean, and do they hold up today? Some remain loved, others loathed, while many more are now forgotten. 

Current time: September 1996. The Playstation’s run of weak games continues, despite runaway successes like Crash Bandicoot and Resident Evil making it the number 1 console. The Saturn’s last grab for survival has seen several creative games draw critical acclaim – and commercial indifference. And the Nintendo 64 is about to make its debut…

Information on what games will be reviewed can be found here; my reviews of 1995′s games are archived on this page, while links to reviews from the current season can be found here.

New posts are made every Sunday, while Sega Saturn reviews are posted on some Saturdays.

Tokyo Highway Battle

Developer	Publisher	Release Date	Best-Seller in	Also Known As	Also On	Playstation Review Number
Genki	Jaleco	5/3/96 (Japan) 9/30/96 (North America) 6/97 (Europe)	Japan (the Best)	Shutokō Battle: Drift King	Saturn	#45

The History:

A sequel to the game Shutokō Battle ‘94 for the SNES, which never left Japan, Tokyo Highway Battle found worldwide release but only saw success in its native Japan.

The Game:

“INCOMPATIBLE PART”

Tokyo Highway Battle offers admirable customization for its day: the Speed Shop features dozens of parts in a dozen categories. And when you try to buy them, you’re liable to get told that part doesn’t go with your car.

You aren’t told what car it does work with, or why it’s incompatible. You’re just told…well, that it doesn’t work with your car.

Such is life in Tokyo Highway Battle.

Child Fighters and Suicidal Rodents

32 Bits is a series where I play and review the most popular games of the past – the games that sold well in their day, not what we look back on fondly now. Why were they popular, what did their success mean, and do they hold up today? Some are loved, others loathed, and many more forgotten. 

Sega Saturn reviews consider the most acclaimed games for the system, cult hits, popular games and a smattering of others I choose as I please.

Information on what games will be reviewed can be found here; my reviews of 1995’s games are archived on this page, while links to reviews from the current season – and a list of those to come – can be found here.

Saturn Review #41:

Virtua Fighter Kids

Developer	Publisher	Release Date	Originally For
Sega AM2	Sega	7/26/96 (Japan) 8/29/96 (North America) 10/3/1996 (Europe)	Arcades

1995, Sega offices, Tokyo.

“Any ideas for building on Virtua Fighter 2’s success?”

“Sure, but first, why are we speaking in English?”

“Because we’re practicing for our Fargo LARP later. Ideas?”

“Oh yeah. How about we just release a dozen minor variations on VF2, until we reach Hyper Super Virtua Fighter 2: The New Warriors?”

“How about we make the game easier and turn all the characters into kids, except they look the same, only smaller and with big heads?”

“BRILLIANT!”

“Who was even talking just then? This scenario is very vague and confusing.”

That’s how it went down. Probably.

Wikipedia informs me Virtua Fighter Kids was a promotional item for “Java Tea” and also a test of face animation for Virtua Fighter 3. The former is confirmed by the invaluable Sega Retro wiki; the latter fact, well, this article also has a “THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT CITE ANY REFERENCES OR SOURCES” banner, so take it as you will.

Virtua Fighter 2, but super deformed. And a bit easier, as you can program your own combos. That’s it.

Nothing is changed about the characters otherwise, so when Kage loses his mask you see scars – on a cartoonishly large head.

Last time I covered a rereleased game for the Saturn it was Virtua Fighter Remix and Daytona USA Championship Edition. Those games were apologies for the original subpar ports that accompanied the system’s surprise US launch; the former was given out for free. At least Virtua Fighter Kids was just an attempt at cashing in on the game’s popularity – and the presumably lucrative contract from “Java Tea” – and not a way of making up for past failures, since Sega was past that phase.

VIRTUA FIGHTER, but with kids. It’s as good as Virtua Fighter 2 since it is Virtua Fighter 2, unless there’s something I didn’t notice, but it’s also full of big heads and the like. So. 

Saturn Review #42:

3D Lemmings

Image Credit: Moby Games.

Developer	Publisher	Release Date	Originally for	Also On
Clockwork Games	Psygnosis	7/6/96 (Europe) 8/23/96 (Japan)	PC	Playstation

1958. The year of Disney’s nature documentary White Wilderness. An Oscar winner for best documentary, it would find enduring fame for something far less laudable.

Up in Alberta, filmmakers tasked with filming a segment on small rodents called lemmings quickly found that lemmings are boring. But sometimes, during their migrations, they fall off cliffs…

David Attenborough they weren’t: that segment’s director flew lemmings into a foreign environment and launched them off cliffs to mockup the mythical mass suicide behavior these unassuming mammals are always associated with.

1991. Disney’s craven act of fraud and animal cruelty inspired a pretty good video game (there’s a sentence I never expected to write). DMA’s original Lemmings tasked players with saving little purple-and-green critters from themselves, turning individual lemmings into special ones that could guide their brethren to the exit and not into a gauntlet of deadly threats.

The 3D  debut of Lemmings adds a new type of Lemming, the Turner, who turns Lemmings 90 degrees – into the back or front. It’s basically the same Lemmings as before but with awkward camera positioning (like two-thirds of all 32 bit games). Good luck.

Taking a 2D game and moving it into 3D was a tricky business. Konami’s Metal Gear Solid improved on its predecessors so massively that few can remember, much less like the NES Metal Gear; but their troubled attempts at making a quality 3D Castlevania continue to this day. Sega’s 3D Sonic games are inconsistent in terms of quality. Lemmings, by contrast, is just…Lemmings, but with tedious camera problems that over-complicate everything!

This review began with a horrifying historical anecdote and now must end by saying 3D Lemmings didn’t try to reinvent the wheel with its franchise, without working around one of the biggest problems of its generation. 3D Lemmings: occasionally frustrating, never transcendent of its flaws. 

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Tomorrow: Die Hard Trilogy & Mortal Kombat Trilogy

Next Saturday: Soccer games for the Saturn and Playstation.

But here’s a preview of NBA Action!

Sega’s NBA Action, developed by Gray Matter, isn’t a…great sports game. And it feels heretical to play old sports games. They exist in the now. Also I never play them on my own so I have no real reference point. Originally I considered just banning them but realized that, even if they give little to discuss in terms of gameplay, they do have a historical context. For instance, how cancelling Madden NFL 96 caused Sony’s GameDay series to temporarily take the lead – back when EA’s Madden had competition.

In NBA Action I elected to play as the Chicago Bulls. All the players from ’95-96 are there: Dennis Rodman, the Croatian guy…and of course, the greatest player they ever saw:

ROSTER GUARD. The greatest. He puts up a prayer, the prayer is answered. You’ll believe a man can fly. What I’m saying is, the game’s announcer is absurdly melodramatic.

Who’s Roster Guard? He could be standing in for a famous player who licensed his image independently and thus couldn’t be included, but don’t be ridiculous. When he appears as the game’s top player he exists in perpetual shadow. What a wonderful move by the Bulls to add a Smoke Monster to their roster, one who oddly is in the same place as that unnamed player who once left to do baseball.

I had never played a full season mode in a sports game before, so I decided to go through the whole season in NBA Action. Then I learned that meant 82 games.  Plus best of 7 playoffs. So see NBA Action’s review either with the soccer games next Saturday or (more likely) with my reviews of football and hockey games in…quite some time from now. Gotta quarantine the sports.

CURRENT RATING IN THE 2013-2014 1995-1996 CHICAGO BULLS SEASON: 14-4. Lost to the Charlotte Hornets, Cleveland Cavaliers, Orlando Magic and San Antonio Spurs. I don’t know anything about basketball so I’m not sure if I should be surprised by those losses.

I also began playing Super Mario 64 in advance of a review in a while.

32 Bits, Playstation/Saturn Crossover Edition: Wipeout, Cyber Speedway and Hi-Octane

It is November 1995. Gamers are wondering: what’s the future? The Playstation is a runaway success, besting Sega’s Saturn – yet there was still the pending release of Nintendo’s new system the following year. What would happen there?

32 Bits is a series about the most popular console games of their day; not the classics we look back on today, but what people were playing then. How did these games, even the now-forgotten ones,say about where gaming was heading? What do they say about where gaming had already been? Let’s find out.

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Today we consider three games that represent a very specific trend in gaming. One of them popularized a new “genre”; another was a Saturn-exclusive precursor, and our last game is a hastily developed one from a developer whose days were numbered.

The early to mid 90s are the last time in the story of gaming, thus far, where developers were often seeking to create something new. The evolution from 2D to 3D demanded change and innovation. Some of these new modes of gaming stood the test of time: stealth games, first-person shooters, real-time strategy. Other “innovations” were more dubious – FMV games, for instance, which were thankfully just a passing fad.

Another thread in the story of gaming was the attempt to take old styles and give them new coats of paint: give familiar types of games the appearance of being something revelatory.

There is a story – I can’t remember where I read it, or its veracity – of an early Atari developer proposing a new racing game only to be told they already had one racing game, why should they tap that well again? The developer proposes an absurd new environment, such as racing on the ceiling, and it counts as just new enough. I’m not entirely sure how that story ended, where I found it, if it’s true or indeed what the point of it was. I may have dreamt it.

Futuristic racers were a new style of a very, very old type of game. They were as bright, graphically, as a Ridge Racer. Yet they were more than just a new veneer slapped onto a generic game. Futuristic racers developed their own standards and clichés in their brief heyday.

Like kart racers, futuristic racing games often featured weapons – though less outwardly silly ones, such as missiles. They focus overwhelmingly on speed. And they have similar aesthetics.

The first of the games I will look at is Wipeout. However, it is not the first futuristic racing game. That honor falls not to any of today’s games, but Nintendo’s F-Zero. Thanks to the delayed début of the Nintendo 64 F-Zero could not usher the form into a new generation. So it goes.

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Playstation #13:

Wipeout

Developed by Psygnosis, published by Sony

Released: November 21, 1995 (US)

Best-Seller In: America (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum)

Also on: Sega Saturn, DOS

Playstation #11 and 12: Doom and Destruction Derby

It is November 1995. Gamers are wondering: what’s the future? The Playstation is a runaway success, besting Sega’s Saturn – yet there was still the pending release of Nintendo’s new system the following year. What would happen there?

32 Bits is a series about the most popular console games of their day; not the classics we look back on today, but what people were playing then. How did these games, even the now-forgotten ones, influence the course of gaming? What do they say about where gaming had already been? Let’s find out.

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Playstation #11: Doom

Originally Developed/Published by id Software in 1993

Ported to the Playstation by Williams

Released: November 16, 1995

Best-Seller in: North America (Greatest Hits), Europe (Platinum)

Doom was not merely popular. It was a phenomenon, an epochal release that defined its decade and the course of gaming as a whole. Gamers were thrilled by its then-advanced graphics, first-person action and online multiplayer. Developers spent years trying – and failing – to copy it (it wasn’t for nothing that first person shooters were, for years, called “Doom clones”). The public protested its bloody violence and demonic imagery. Even the United States government took a shine to Doom, modding it to serve as a Marine training sim. For the computer gamer in the ’90s, there was no way to escape Doom.