Player One Podcast

Publisher: Bignet U.S.A.

Developer: Micronet Co., Ltd.

Released: 1992

Black Hole Assault was one of the early releases on the Sega CD (cardboard box and all). I doubt many people know that it was actually a sequel to a Genesis game Heavy Nova. Not that anyone would find that overly exciting, considering how shitty Heavy Nova was.

The original cartridge game was a hybrid of the platforming and one-on-one fighter genres, where players would pilot their giant robot through short levels filled with basic enemy robots on their way to a boss encounter. Once there, the game would switch to a Street Fighter-style interface and the two robots would battle it out until one of them exploded.

And it was awful. Sluggish controls, poor level design, and abysmal hit detection made for a painful gaming experience.

Black Hole Assault ditched the platforming elements of its predecessor and went with a strictly fighting affair, featuring eight different robots to pummel into submission as players worked their way through story mode.

Unfortunately, things hadn’t really improved much with the jump to the Sega CD the interface and hit detection were still downright awful, making the game nearly unplayable. And the only real 鼎Dbit to this game was the especially long opening story scene and subsequent cut-scenes every couple of levels.

Black Hole Assault did have one interesting feature, and that was the fact that the different gravity of each planet (level) actually had an effect on the two fighters usually in the form of lower or higher jumps. It was a cool feature that was pretty much completely lost in the crappy game surrounding it.

Greg Sewart Micronet, Sega CD Black Hole Assault

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