Player One Podcast

Publisher: Core Design
Developer: Core Design
Released: 1994

Was there a more prolific Sega CD developer than Core Design? Probably not. Hot on the heels of my Battlecorps bit comes BC Racers. I could rattle on and on about all the names attached to this game that would eventually go on to create the Tomb Raider franchise, or how Core was really pushing the 3D envelope on the Sega CD, or how they ultimately disappeared from the video game landscape…but that was all covered in the previous WELO METOT HENEX TLEVEL entry. Go read it. It was awesome.

BC Racers is the third game in Core’s Chuck Rock series. Back in the 16-bit era, everyone seemed to think that, to be successful, you needed some sort of mascot. Chuck Rock was Core’s answer to that requirement – an overweight caveman that starred in a couple of fairly mediocre sidescrolling platformers.

Considering Mario was the reason everyone felt the need to create their own mascots, it’s no surprise that Core followed Nintendo’s lead right to the point that their caveman ended up starring in a kart racer, as well.

But this isn’t really a Mario Kart clone in the strictest sense. BC Racers feels like Mario Kart without the weapons, merged with the combat style of Road Rash, and without even half the charm of either game.

So in a way, BC Racers maintained about the same level of quality we’d come to expect from the Chuck Rock series. The game isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just not really exceptional in any way.

And talk about backing the wrong horse – BC Racers appeared on the Sega CD, 32X, and 3DO. Good choices!

One tiny bit of interesting info I found while doing my research on BC Racers (considering I blew the Lara Croft wad on Battlecorps) is that one of the concept guys on this game eventually went on to be one of the programmers on Robotech: The Macross Saga for the GBA. OK…so that’s not overly interesting, but it does give me a very miniscule link to this game – the first game I ever worked on as a developer being a Robotech title and all.

Greg Sewart BC Racers, Chuck Rock, Core Design, Sega CD

Publisher: Core Design

Developer: Core Design

Released: 1994

Nowadays, I don’t know that anyone really knows who Core Design was. Though if you’re old enough to remember the original Tomb Raider, chances are you’ve at least heard the name. Hard as it is to believe now, there was a time that Lara Croft was the hottest video game character in the world.

But for me, Core’s reputation as a creator of quality games was well established by the time Tomb Raider came about, thanks to their impressive titles on the Sega CD.

If you’ve been reading this series since the beginning (and who hasn’t?) you know that one of the biggest perks to the CD upgrade was the inclusion of hardware scaling and rotation. And Core Design was one of the first and best studios to take advantage of the Sega CD’s pseudo 3D capabilities. They constantly released games that pushed the hardware – starting with Jaguar XJ220 and AH-3 Thunderstrike.

In fact, the Thunderstrike format is one they stuck with through the life of the system, with follow-ups Soulstar and Battlecorps feeling very similar.

And even though I count those first two Core games as some of my faves on the Sega CD, I’m kind of sad to admit that I didn’t spend much time at all with the latter two. Now that I have spent a bit of time with Battlecorps, though, I have to say I’m both impressed and underwhelmed.

Impressed because – as mentioned before – this game looks fantastic in motion (at least in comparison to other console games from the early ’90s). The explosion animation in particular is really sweet.

I’m underwhelmed in that these games just don’t age that well. 3D movement and control was clunky at best back in the day. Now, in the era of dual analog sticks and true 3D worlds, the 16-bit stuff generally doesn’t hold up at all. Compensating for the limited controller tends to lend an added layer of difficulty to what was already a pretty hardcore game to begin with.

Anyhoo, this is a mech shooter in the vein of MechWarrior, where you’re piloting a giant bipedal war machine across 12 missions in order to take out an insane super-computer and save the world. How ’90s!

I don’t have much more to say about this game, to be honest. I just didn’t really experience it back in the day, and thus don’t have any strong memories about it.

By the way: Core Design went on to release (and be cursed by) the mega-hit Tomb Raider games. After years of being forced to push out a new title in the franchise annually, the series was finally taken away and given to Crystal Dynamics. This lead to a mass exodus of talent, and sale of the remnants of the company to Rebellion. The last I heard of what Core became – Rebellion Derby Studio – they were finally shut down. Sad.

Greg Sewart Battlecorps, Core Design, Sega CD, Tomb Raider

 

Publisher: Good Deal Games (Acclaim)

Developer: Domark

Released: 2004 (1994)

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned Good Deal Games on this blog or not. They’re a great place to find copies of previously unreleased games for some of your favourite classic game systems. They have a decent selection of Sega CD titles available, one of which is Battle Frenzy.

Battle Frenzy was actually released in 1994 in the UK, but didn’t see a North American release until a decade later.

This is another example of a Genesis cartridge game being re-released on the CD format, complete with redbook audio and… not a whole lot else. Considering this is a first-person shooter, it’s not surprising to see other reviews out there on the interwebs saying it was only possible through the scaling and rotation abilities of the Sega CD hardware.

Not true. The cartridge version of the game runs pretty much exactly the same as the CD release.

The goal in Battle Frenzy is to navigate 12 levels of shooty action. Each level contains a core (or something) that you must destroy. Once that’s done, you have to run back to the level entrance before a timer counts down and everything goes boom.

It’s not only very repetitive – it’s very difficult to play. There’s a reason we didn’t see a whole lot of first-person shooters on the console scene before the advent of the dual-analog stick controller. This thing is just a pain to control, with the d-pad controlling both look and forward/backward movement, and a button that you can hold in order to strafe.

When I do these updates, I always try to find something interesting about each title. It was difficult to come up with much in this case. Of course, developer Domark is one of the handful of software houses that eventually merged to create Eidos Interactive (currently owned by Square-Enix).

I thought that was all I’d have to go with. But then a name in the credits jumped out at me. Ian Livingstone is credited with writing the story in Battle Frenzy. If you’re a child of the 80s, you might remember him as a writer of fantasy fiction, as well as one of the people behind the Fighting Fantasy series of books – a sort of single player, RPG-lite series for the younger crowd.

Turns out he’s been a part of the games industry for a long time (and even before that, co-founded Games Workshop in 1975). In fact, he’s still around. When Square-Enix took over Eidos he was apparently promoted to “Life President.”

Sounds fancy.

Greg Sewart Sega CD Battle Frenzy, Good Deal Games, Sega CD

Publisher: Sega

Developer: Malibu Interactive

Released: 1992

 

Anyone who’s listened to our fine podcast likely knows that I count this game as one of my all-time favourites. While Sega was so busy trying to show the world the benefits of their CD add on through full-motion video games like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, the released Batman Returns and showed gamers just how much horsepower this much maligned system really had.

 

The Batman Returns games are another example of the strange – and wonderful – place movie license games were at during the 16-bit era. Batman Returns on the SNES was a completely different beast than the game found on the Genesis (published by Konami and Sega, respectively). The SNES game was a gorgeous looking beat-em-up in the vein of Final Fight, where an impressively big Dark Knight dismantled the Penguin’s Red Triangle Circus Gang one latex-covered punch at a time.

 

The Genesis game, on the other hand, was pretty darn ugly. The characters weren’t all that well animated, the colours were washed out and everything was very purple. The music was also prety awful (a bit of a trend in Sega’s Genesis games for a while there). Most importantly, though, was that it played like a very shallow, overly frustrating beat-em-up. I quickly gave up on it.

 

Boy was I wrong.

 

The main selling point on the Sega CD version was the all new driving segments. Yes, the main action game was just a repackage of the Genesis cartridge. But the driving segments promised to put the Sega CD through its paces, with crazy amounts of scaling and rotating sprites (state of the art on consoles back then) that put the sheet of paper Batmobile segments of the SNES Batman Returns to shame.

 

So basically, I bought the CD version under the pretense that I was buying kick ass driving game, not to mention a showpiece for my expensive add on. That the cartridge game was in there was more of a bonus.

 

Sega positioned it as such, too, as there’s an option right from the start to play the driving levels exclusively (plus, choosing this option added an extra driving level to the end of the game).

 

I wasn’t disappointed. Batman Returns – The Driving Game is one of the most amazing 16-bit experiences I ever had. Driving through each stage, shooting Red Triangle cars and motorcycles, or checking them into buildings along the side of the road was awesome. The bosses were huge and varied. The challenge was just right. The music was incredible (my first real experience with Spencer Nilsen’s work). And the level of detail just blew me away – driving through road obstacles or blowing up enemies generally resulted in a scattering of shapnel bouncing and rotating all over the road.

 

I remember talking to my pal Jim – who worked at the game store I frequented at the time – and just praising the game up and down. At one point I mentioned it was a real shame that it was over so soon, and that the action game wasn’t even worth playing. That’s where I was wrong, he told me. Despite the crappy visuals, the action game was actually pretty fun. The magic was in weapon management.

 

See, Batman Returns came with loads of wonderful toys at the Caped Crusader’s disposal. And if you played the game simply trying to kick and punch your way to the end, you missed out on all of that. It’s the age-old gamer behaviour – save your special weapons for the boss encounters. The way to play this game, though, was to utilize the various weapons constantly throughout every level, keeping an eye on your supply and learning which one was best for every situation.

 

With this knowledge, I tackled the game again and couldn’t believe how much fun I was having. Spencer Nilsen’s great soundtrack helped to pull my focus away from the general ugliness, and all I saw was a great action game with a level of depth I never even suspected it had.

 

I played the game over and over again. Even after I’d beaten it (the full game – all driving and action levels combined) I played it again in order to refine my strategy for each encounter. At my peak, I could play through the full game in exactly one hour, each and every time. For some reason, that made me very proud.

 

It’s not that pathetic. Remember, this was a pre-GameFAQs world.

 

This game is significant in a few other ways, too. One major reason being that, for all the scrambling to get real actors on screen as we made our first forays into the brave new world that was multimedia gaming, Batman Returns featured absolutely no footage or still images from the film. Neither did it include any of Danny Elfman’s score. Heck, it didn’t even feature many sound bites – the only one I remember hearing was the Penguin mocking me on the “Continue” screen.

 

This was also the game that helped cement my alliegence to GameFan magazine and to assure I didn’t pick up another copy of EGM for a long, long time. GameFan covered this and most other Sega CD games with their trademark level of enthusiasm. EGM, on the other hand, seemed to write the system off almost immediately. I vividly remember reading that the SNES version’s driving bits – the flat, sheet of paper, mode 7 stuff that was so impressive one time, and became so boring after a while – were every bit as good as what you’d find on the Sega CD.

 

At least, that’s how I remember it. I’m probably a bit fuzzy on the details. But, being the Sega fanboy that I was, that was enough for me to write off EGM up until just about the point that Ziff Davis first hired me.

 

After all these years, my Batman Returns skills have definitely disappeared. I was able to fumble my way to the end of the game recently, but there was a lot of continuing and save-stating going on. Still, just firing it up every now and then and jumping into that first driving sequence, shooting my first Red Triangle gangster, brings me back to the time when I was devoted to this game so completely – when I had saved up my paper route money to buy the system and hooked it up to my old stereo in order to really experience the great music properly. When I was just about to head into high school. When my buddies and I would go rent a new game on Friday night and spend the whole weekend beating it. Nerd heaven.

 

Good times.

Greg Sewart Batman, Sega CD

It would be really easy to sit here and dump on The Animals for a few hundred words. After all, not only is this a lame “edutainment” title, but it perfectly presents exactly why this kind of software never belonged on the Sega CD in the first place – what with its limited color palette and postage-stamp sized videos.

But that would be a bit unfair. You kind of have to take yourself back to the early 90s, and really think about where CD-ROM was as a medium back then. These little silver discs represented a brave new world of computer and video game softare. No one seems really certain exactly what to do with them at first, though large databases of interesting information seemed a logical choice given the massive amount of storage they had.

Remember, video – even crappy, tiny, grainy video – was not really something you saw too often on a computer screen back then.

And when you do a bit of digging, you realize that this particular bit of software was actually a landmark event. It was one of the most successful, early CD-ROM encyclopedia programs, selling over 3 million copies in its first three years. The developer – now-defunct Arnowitz Studios – was well known as a pioneer of educational and teaching programs back in the day.

The Sega CD version (along with the 3DO version) are basically just products of a new technology trying to find its way. When you think about it, most of the early CD console libraries pretty much fit that description.

That being said, though, the transition from PC program to Sega CD disc was obviously a pretty rocky one. This game cries out for a mouse in order to navigate the slightly confusing Zoo Map front end. And when you get into the sub-menus, it’s still pretty slow going as your little dude, “Ping,” ambles from one entry icon to another.

Not to mention the extremely grainy video and images you get to look at. I’ve never seen the PC version of this program, but I’ve got to believe the VGA/SVGA images and video were a lot prettier than what the Sega CD’s extremely limited color palette could offer.

Publisher Mindscape is still around, though you’d be forgiven for never having heard of them, as they’re mostly doing more edutainment sofware nowadays (a lot of it on the DS). The publisher was a bit more prominent in the 16-bit days, though. And while researching their history for this article, I was reminded that they are actually the group that brought the seminal Wing Commander PC game to the SNES, and touched off my subsequent love of the series. I actually bought a 3DO when I learned that Wing Commander 3 was coming to that system. I also based my first computer purchase largely on whether it could run Wing Commander 4.

So I’m totally not certain whether I should love Mindscape or not…

Next Up: One of the greatest games of all time – Batman Returns.

Greg Sewart Sega CD

Back in the mid-90s, the shooter (or “shmup.” God, I hate that word) was king. In the home gaming market, the Genesis in particular seemed to play home to most of the great shooters on the market. The Sega CD? Not so much. But there were a few of them on there. And they were pretty cool, if only for the CD perks they featured — big, sprite-animation cut scenes; redbook audio; and…well, that was usually it.

Android Assault falls pretty much squarely into the “coulda been on the Genesis” category of Sega CD games, as did most shooters on the system. And it’s not really an amazing shooter, to boot. But it’s not all that bad, either.

The story is, well, unimportant. Some sort of evil is threatening the galaxy, you’re the only hope for peace, and you go blow said evil shit up for a few levels. The key difference in Android Assault is that you’re piloting something more than your standard starfighter — your pretty ship can turn into an awesome giant robot!

It actually sounds a bit cooler than it ends up being. For, when you turn into this robot, it just sort of flies around the screen, frozen in a single pose. It’s really nothing more than an on-screen indicator that your current weapon has been upgraded to the highest level, actually. But to 90s Greg, it was still pretty neat.

Android Assault is relatively short and easy as shooters go. It does fire out a few pretty unique levels, though. The long descent to a planet surface, followed by a lengthy battle beneath that planet’s ocean is definitely not something you saw every day back then. And the bosses tend to be rather large, as well, with a few of them even filling the screen.

Android Assault was published in North America by Big Fun Games. I can’t for the life of me find out anything about this company — not even if they published anything else here.

The developer, however, is one I’m sure a few folks have heard of. Human Entertainment is likely better known in most circles as the house behind the FirePro Wrestling series, along with the Clock Tower games that enjoyed a bit of success on the PlayStation. It also spat out a few Formula 1 games over the years. They folded in 1999, and this was their only Sega CD title.

There is a more contemporary connection, though. Human Entertainment was the first development house to employ Goichi Suda — aka Suda51, of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame.

See? The Sega CD is the system that just keeps on giving and giving.

Next Up: The Animals!

Greg Sewart Big Fun Games, Human Entertainment, Killer7, No More Heroes, Sega CD, Suda51, Video Games

So how about that new Boy and His Blob game for the Wii? Did you know that the original NES game it’s based on was coded by none other than David “Pitfall” Crane? If you’re old enough to remember the actual game when it was released, I bet you did know that.

What does that have to do with A/X-101? Well, during my paltry bit of research into this Sega CD shooter, I found out that the publisher – Absolute Entertainment – was actually co-founded by the very same David Crane. The same David Crane that left Atari to help form Activision. Another cool tidbit – Absolute was named as such because it’s alphabetically ahead of Activision, which was in turn alphabetically ahead of Atari (somewhat of a naming convention among this crowd – see also: Accolade and Acclaim). I guess David and his Absolute pals won that confusing little war.

So yeah…A/X-101 has a bit of a pedigree, I guess.

Not that Crane or Absolute had anything to do with the actual coding of this full-motion video extravaganza. That was handled by Micronet, a Japanese game developer that you’ve probably never heard of. Its lineup of games is pretty mediocre, all-told, though the company apparently still exists. It hasn’t been in the games business since the Dreamcast era, though – it’s a 3D graphic development house now, according to Wikipedia.

The game? Oh! Well…it’s awful. This is one of a handful of full-motion video shooters that came out for the Sega CD, to mixed results. Similar games like Star Wars Rebel Assault and Silpheed were pretty playable and not all that un-good, while other stuff like A/X-101 and Microcosm were just a big, garbled mess of super-low-res full-motion, pre-rendered video playing backdrop to otherwise crappy, boring enemies to shoot in the foreground.

This game is probably more a product of the industry back then, and its desparate need to integrate Hollywood and Silicon Valley into everything. A/X-101 just grinds along, with no music, no excitement, and little to do in the actual game play department. And everything is bookended by some horrendously-acted cinema scenes that are literally comprised of pallette-swapped “pilots” going throgh a single animation over and over again. Brilliant stuff.

Yep…best system ever.

At some point I will cover a good game. I promise.

Greg Sewart A/X-101, Absolute, Activision, David Crane, Micronet, Sega CD

Sega’s arcade heritage is something they never used to have a hard time capitalizing on. The Genesis enjoyed loads of home versions of arcade hits – Hang On, Outrun, Space Harrier, the Shinobi series, and of course, After Burner. But all the technical  trickery employed by the programmers to make those games run on the under-powered Genesis still didn’t keep them from severely lacking in the visuals department. That’s where the Sega CD came in.

In the first wave of Sega CD games (back when they came in cardboard boxes and standard-size jewel cases) was After Burner III. Imagine the excitement! No more of the stuttering, redrawn sprites the Genesis used for 3D motion. The Sega CD could do that stuff on the fly! This was going to be the greatest home version of After Burner ever made!

Or not.

A lot of the first run Sega CD games were nothing but gussied up Genesis cartridges featuring great, redbook audio soundtracks, and After Burner III was no different. This sluggish mess actually seems to perform a bit worse than some of the later Genesis renditions of Yu Suzuki’s classic arcade games.

And, if you want to get all technical, apparently it really isn’t even an After Burner game in the first place. Rather, it’s a Sega CD port of Strike Fighter, an arcade game released exclusively in Japan. Though any real fan of After Burner could probably tell there was something fishy going on back in the day.

There’s actually a lot to love about this game when you take a look at the feature list – a few different game modes, two different viewing options (though the full plane view obscures way too much of the screen), day and night missions, ground targets, unlimited missiles, and a pretty rockin’ soundtrack.

 

But none of those great features ever comes together to create anything…well, fun. You just slog along firing at wave after endless wave of enemies, with almost none of the excitement you could find in the first two After Burner games.

I think the most frustrating part of the whole deal is how the game seems to take almost no advantage of the hardware it’s on. While most people would normally point out that any early game on new hardware tends to steer clear of more advanced bells and whistles, the fact that the superb Batman Returns (one of the most impressive bits of Sega CD programmery ever) came out around the same time as After Burner really left me scratching my head at the whole thing.

So yeah…another triumph for the Sega CD. I swear I’ll get to some good games sometime in the near future.

Greg Sewart After Burner, Sega CD

Many apologies for how long it’s taken to release another installment of my impossibly poorly conceived look at the Sega CD’s library. But read on, and you’ll understand why this latest post is so delayed.

The Sega CD brought a lot of promise with it. Not only did it open up the possibility of full-motion video playback in our games (the future!), real voice acting, and the much-celebrated hardware scaling and rotation that was already featured in the SNES — fairly early on us console gamers were promised that we would finally get to experience a lot of those great adventure games that had, up until that point, lived solely on the personal computer.

Understand, this was a pretty big deal to me. We didn’t have a computer in my house while I was growing up. And while I got to experience a lot of the Sierra games on my friend’s crappy, amber monochrome monitor from time to time, all that really did was make me pine for a chance to play more of these types of games.

Willy Beamish was one of the first PC ports to hit the Sega CD. It’s the story of a young, Bart Simpson-esque citizen of Frumpton whose summer vacation is spent pursuing childish activities like frog jumping contests and practicing for a big video game competition. In the meantime, he fights vampire babysitters, tricks bullies out of beating him senseless, and takes down a criminal conspiracy by the owner of the Toot Sweet corporation. Just another lazy summer.

My nostalgia-fueled memories of playing through Willy Beamish back in the day convinced me that this was a wonderful game. It features colourful graphics, large characters, genuinely funny situations, and every bit of dialogue and narration is voiced. That was a pretty huge deal back in the day.

And as I readied to play the game again, I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I never finished the damn thing.

Now I do.

The Adventures of Willy Beamish on the Sega CD should be great, but it’s actually excruciating. The problem lies in all that great voice acting and high quality sound effects — every time a new sound or bit of dialoque plays, the entire game freezes for a few seconds while the system loads in the right file. It absolutely destroys the pacing of the game, not to mention extends the play time in the worst way possible.

During this playthrough, I got very close to the end before I just couldn’t take it anymore.

Thus far my trip down memory lane has been a bit of a bust. But hey, the Sega CD is still the greatest system ever made.

Greg Sewart Sega CD, Video Games Willy Beamish

In the long-awaited second installment of my journey through one of the greatest game libraries of all time, we take the Dark Knight’s second (!) Sega CD adventure for a spin.

First, some background. Batman Returns on the Sega CD is one of the greatest Batman games ever made. There. I said it. And this is due in no small part to the inclusion of some amazing Batmobile segments that really put the peripheral through its paces. They put the SNES’ sheet-of-paper Mode 7 effects to shame (unless you were an EGM editor back in the day…). Pure sex.

The followup is based on the awesome Warner Bros. cartoon featuring Batsy and his acrobatic sidekick. This would be cool enough on its own — after all, the SNES and Genesis games based on the cartoon were both great. But on top of that, it uses the same engine that powered those amazing Batman Returns driving segments. The lead programmer is even the same dude from Batman Returns. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything!

First of all, basing an entire Batman game around driving stages alone really doesn’t make for a lot of variety, though I will admit the developers tried to get a bit creative. The Riddler’s virtual reality level in particular is a nice change of pace.

The bigger problem, though, is the ridiculous difficulty right from the word go. You press start, and you’re immediately dropped into traffic that would put rush hour on the LA freeway to shame. And these aren’t cars you can shoot. They’re civilians…you have to avoid them at all costs. And there’s a very unforgiving time limit. So you have to drive fast, you can’t hit anything, and you’re not allowed to shoot anything? Sounds almost as awesome as it plays!

The Sega fanboy in me is desperately searching for something positive to say about this mess. Oh! The visuals are pretty darned impressive for a 16-bit game. Considering how fast everything is moving, and how many sprites are on-screen. Yeah! This is a great tech demo! Just never, ever pick up the controller and try to play it, and you  have one of the best Sega CD games ever made.

Actually, there is something very unique and kind of cool about this otherwise unplayable disc. It features around 25 minutes of completely original animation. So you could technically call this a lost episode of the Batman & Robin cartoon. And it features just about every villain, including the Joker as voiced by Mark Hamill himself. And thanks to the magic of the internets, every bit of that animation canbe found on Youtube.

So far my foray into the best the Sega CD has to offer has turned up two of the worst games on the system. But hey, there was a fair bit of crap on this system. And while I  can promise installment #3 will arrive a bit quicker than this one did, but I can’t promise the quality of game will get any better.

Greg Sewart Batman, Sega CD, Video Games