Player One Podcast

Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Developer: Core Design
Release: 1993

When last we saw Chuck, he was busy saving his wife Ophelia from local weirdo Garry Gritter. And according to the intro of Chuck Rock II, once our prehistoric hero had rescued his sweetie, he went on to invent the first automobile, amassing a large fortune in the process.

The only thing that was missing from Chuck and Ophelia’s perfect life was an heir to the family fortune. Enter Junior: chip off the ol’ Rock and hero of our new story.

Seems Chuck’s got a rival in Brick Jagger, a local inventor who has decided that, rather than creating his own line of vehicles, he’ll just hire some muscle to kidnap Chuck instead. And while Ophelia loses her mind over the loss of her husband, Junior sets off on his own to save his dad, armed only with a club and the diaper around his bottom.

Chuck Rock was a decent game, and apparently that’s all you needed back in the day to warrant a sequel. Son of Chuck plays pretty much the same as the previous game in the series, featuring a series of mostly side-scrolling levels filled with dinosaurs to club, platforms to climb, and bosses to bash.

The first impression I got when firing up Chuck Rock II was how much more refined it seems to be than its predecessor. The voice work is a thousand times better, the animation has lost that strange, Core style and adopted a much more fitting Flintstones motif. The presentation is just generally better by a mile.

The game play has been upgraded slightly, too, thanks mostly to the fact that Junior carries around a big club. In the original game, Chuck had to rely on his beer gut to dole out punishment. While that was fitting for the character, it really didn’t offer much in the way of range. Junior’s club, on the other hand, lets the little tyke stay a bit further out of harm’s way as he smashes his way through the legion of cartoon bad guys standing between him and his dad.

But despite these upgrades, Chuck II still suffers from the same generally mediocre action of the prequel. Dozens of surprisingly short levels make up the game world, and outside of the odd, large-ish creature to fight, there really isn’t anything all that exciting going on.

Looking back now, it’s amazing to me how much staying power these characters seemed to have. Not only were there two games in the main series (released to all the major consoles), there was also a kart racer, and apparently a regular comic appearing in a popular kids’ magazine in the UK – LookIn. Unfortunately, the comic only lasted about a year before the magazine itself went under. The final scene featured Chuck being swept away from his boat. He washed ashore on a tribal island and was revered as a god by the locals.

Weird.

Anyway, this is the end for Chuck in this particular series of articles. I know you’ll all miss him as much as I will.

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

Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
Developer: Core Design
Released: 1992

I’ve probably said this a dozen times already during the WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL series, but I can’t believe how prolific Core Design was on a system that really wasn’t around all that long. Plus they covered just about every genre while they were at it.

It’s easy to mark different eras in the game industry based on the specific genres everyone is trying to cash in on. Right now it’s first-person shooters. At one point it was racers. Sports games. 3D action games. And way back in Mario’s glory days, it was the platformer. The early 90s were filled with hundreds of me-too platformers featuring cartoony little everymen or cute, cuddly, anthropomorphic creatures (with attitude, if you’re talking 1991 or later). Aero the Acro-Bat, Rocket Knight, Bubsy, B.O.B. – the list went on and on.

Before they would set a new standard with the likes of Tomb Raider, Core Design was on the Mario clone gravy train as well, and Chuck Rock was their mascot. This stupid, beer-swilling caveman with a jutting chin and ridiculously hot (read: big-breasted) wife appeared on no less than 10 different systems. And that was just the first game in the series.

The story goes like this – Chuck’s wife Ophelia has been kidnapped by Gary Gritter (the local weirdo, according to the narrator), and he’s off to jump and belly bump through a handful of different stages to get her back. Pretty straight-forward for 1992, really.

I do love that the somewhat perverted Gary Gritter is a play on real-life rock star Gary Glitter, particularly when we all learned a few years later that he was a bit of a perv himself.

Replaying this game, I can’t believe how mediocre it was. The levels are short (though there is an endless supply of them) and mostly by the numbers. The graphics are alright, but nothing special. But for some reason I remember there being a bit of hype around this series.

Perhaps it was GameFan’s fault. The magazine had a bad habit of talking up anything remotely resembling a platformer back then, especially when it came from Core Design.

Chuck Rock really goes nowhere fast, and playing it so many years after the fact is pretty painful. It has a certain charm shared by a lot of European platformers, but that never really keeps me interested past the first few levels.

Interesting tidbit? Well, as with any Core game, a lot of the folks who worked on this also helped introduce the world to Lara Croft. In fact, Lara creator Toby Gard has a direct link to the Chuck Rock series – he was the designer on BC Racers. Interesting!

Right?

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

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