Tag Archives: virtual hydlide

32 Bits: Virtual Hydlide

Posted on by Ellen Edwards

Saturn #9:

VIRTUAL HYDLIDE

Developed by T&E Soft, published by Atlus

Released: 1995

“Digitized main character for the ultimate in realism!”

“Computer graphics and 3D backgrounds created on high-tech work stations!”

Virtual Hydlide promised cutting-edge realism. Even in 1995, this claim was laughable – and in 2013, it’s a sickeningly ugly cascade of poor decisions. And when I say sickening, I mean sickening: I couldn’t play more than 20 minutes of Virtual Hydlide before I realized I had a headache and was on the verge of throwing up. The main question I emerged with was: Why?

Why is the main character a digitized sprite in a 3D world? Why is he seen from behind, so we can appreciate every one of his jerky motions? Why does this perspective make it so hard to tell how far you are from enemies, or to navigate indoors?

Why are objects also 2D, with no back rendered? Sure, objects were like that in Doom – notably a first person game. In Virtual Hydlide you can compare your own movement to the constantly shifting grave stones around you; the effect is disorienting.

Why is it that the game’s objective is only evident when you check your map? You spawn in the middle of a field with no indication as to how to progress. Once you do check your map, you see a dot on the other side of the world from you – your goal. Run there, go inside, get a new dot. Repeat.

Why does the world consist exclusively of muddy greens and browns? Why are there so many gnarled trees and scrabbly little plants scattered around?

Why do you level up only when you complete an area? What’s the point of killing enemies?

And above all, why does Virtual Hydlide run at a consistent single-digit FPS? Even though the common tactic of fog is employed*, Virtual Hydlide is essentially a slideshow.

What makes Virtual Hydlide’s failure especially sad is that it plays around with some interesting ideas.

Every time you play, a new world map is generated. You can share your world’s code with others. You rarely saw such features in this era of gaming…and it isn’t executed skillfully here, since every world has the same goals.

The simplistic and story-light gameplay could have harkened back to NES modes of design, were it any good. Virtual Hydlide is both a sequel to and remake of a game ported to the original NES, after all. When I ran across the overworld, I was shocked when a tree came to life and tried to eat me. Tedium gave way to momentary surprise, and thrill of discovery. Yet this gave way to tedium as I stabbed and retreated, stabbed and retreated…

Moments that jar you from the doldrums of Virtual Hydlide are sadly rare. Possibly the worst game I’ve ever played, I went into Virtual Hydlide brimming with hope. I knew of its troubled reputation and that it had few defenders; yet I was hoping I could rediscover the game and claim it was a lost classic – or, at the very least, playable. I emerged from the experience full of disappointment and vomit.

Sad, really.

notes

  • Besides the Hydlide series – which came to an end with this game – T&E Soft seems to have mainly developed golf sims.

  • Once again, my screenshot program made this game appear even worse-looking than it actually is, and I have no idea what caused it to look that way. Virtual Hydlide in motion is not quite as dark as these screenshots show – but it is still pretty awful.
  • ATLUS WHY DID YOU PUBLISH THIS IN AMERICA
  • Speaking of Atlus…one of the unfortunate aspects of this series: a lot of the Saturn’s library is in Japanese. This isn’t too much of a problem when it comes to shooters, fighting games, platformers and other text-light genres. RPGs, though? Sega of America wasn’t too interested in importing RPGs. A sign of how far this policy went: the Saturn had one of the greatest RPGs of the fifth generation, Grandia, and they refused to publish it in America. It ended up on the Playstation instead. Another example: 1995’s Magic Knight Rayearth ended up reaching America in the Saturn’s final viable year, 1998, as one of the last Saturn games ever released. While systems like the SNES and even Playstation have had many Japan-only games translated by fans, the only fan translations avaliable for the Saturn are of the missing chapters of Shining Force III. And thus I can’t play some games I wanted to play, such as 1995’s Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner by Atlus. And so the first Megami Tensei game I play will be Persona for the Playstation, late in 1996.
  • *Early 3D games had a limited draw distance. Many developers compensated by adding in a kind of mist that blocked out far-away objects – ones that didn’t need to be rendered immediately. Of note, Silent Hill’s famous fog began as a way to cope with technical limitations before becoming a standard element of the series. Back to top

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NEXT TIME: On a more positive note, tomorrow we consider several “classic” Saturn games.