This week! We talk about the following game tapes: Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Pushmo, Sonic CD, the Humble Indie Bundle, Rage, InFamous 2. Plus! The 3DS gets the GBA Ambassador games, Club Nintendo offering downloadable games, PlayStation Vita, holiday-themed gaming traditions, Pokemon Warriors and more.
Check out Greg’s new web series Generation 16 – click here.
Own an iPhone/iPod touch? We’ve got an app for that–the Player One Podcast player app is available now. Play shows new and old, read show notes, access the show Twitter, website, email, voicemail line and more! Plus, you’ll be able to access bonus audio and video content (soon, once we figure out what that is). Click here to download.
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sega Studios
Release: 1995
Full-motion video games were, for the most part, pretty bad. Although I enjoy a few of them, they pretty much sucked. And Fahrenheit is a perfect example of why they sucked.
Playing this game now, one of the first things that strikes me is that the production values are actually pretty darn good as far as Sega CD FMV games go. The sets look convincing, as do all the props. And that’s no mean feat considering the whole game is based on entering burning buildings.
I also have to say that it sounds like the casting couch was located somewhere north of the 49th parallel – the actors all seem to have very noticeable Canadian accents. A little research uncovered that this is indeed the case for a few of them, and also that Sega cast a bunch of stunt people in the main character roles (which I guess explains the bad acting to a degree). A lot of the main cast is still active today, in fact.
But the reason that it sucks is that its game play is almost entirely based on trial-and-error.
Take the first house, for example. Most of the family has escaped the burning home, but you’re informed that one of the daughters may still be inside. And so you are tasked with entering the house, disposing of any hazardous materials and saving any people who might be trapped.
Game play is comprised of various video clips shot from a first-person view, accompanied by on-screen indicators of the choices at your disposal. These can be directional arrows or action commands. All are shown with a timer, which, if it runs out indicates that the game will make the (wrong) decision for you.
The problem is that the camera is constantly moving, so it’s next to impossible to get your bearings. And even if you do push “up” while facing a door, it’s not guaranteed you’ll actually head in that direction at all.
Also, most of the major decisions are absolutely random, with no real tell as to what the proper choice is. Sure, you definitely want to get rid of that kerosene heater that may explode. But when you want ot turn off the gas to the range, you’re presented with three valves to choose from. None of them stand out, and none of your teammates has any advice that helps you choose which valve to turn. So, turn the wrong one, and you lose. Start over.
The whole game is like this, and it’s a crying shame. The premise is actually a very cool one, not to mention pretty unique as far as video games go. And with production values higher than you normally see on the average Sega CD FMV game, Fahrenheit just begs to be played.
Fahrenheit is also unique in another way – as far as I know this is the only dual-format Sega CD/32X game release in the US (perhaps the world). When you bought Fahrenheit, it came on three discs – a Sega CD disc, a 32X disc, and a Key Disc. The Key Disc needed to be loaded first, followed by whichever version of the game you wanted to play. The function of the key disc was to supposedly keep players from selling the version of the game they didn’t want.
NOTE: The images that accompany this article were taken from the 32X version of the game.
This week! We talk about the following game tapes: Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Pushmo, Trine 2 and Tomb Raider: Underworld. Plus! New updates for the Xbox 360 dashboard and 3DS systems, Miyamoto “retiring,” and the Spike VGAs.
Check out Greg’s new web series Generation 16 – click here.
Own an iPhone/iPod touch? We’ve got an app for that–the Player One Podcast player app is available now. Play shows new and old, read show notes, access the show Twitter, website, email, voicemail line and more! Plus, you’ll be able to access bonus audio and video content (soon, once we figure out what that is). Click here to download.
This week! We talk about the following game tapes: Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Infinity Blade 2, Voltron: Defender of the Universe and House of the Dead Overkill Extended Cut. Plus! GamePro closing down, Vita PSN accounts and memory pricing, and Xenoblade Chronicles being released in North America.
Check out Greg’s new web series Generation 16 – click here.
Own an iPhone/iPod touch? We’ve got an app for that–the Player One Podcast player app is available now. Play shows new and old, read show notes, access the show Twitter, website, email, voicemail line and more! Plus, you’ll be able to access bonus audio and video content (soon, once we figure out what that is). Click here to download.
My WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL series not enough to satisfy your classic Sega cravings, you say? I feel your pain. And so I’m here to introduce a new Sega-based series on the Player One Podcast: Generation 16.
Generation 16 is a video series chronicling the rise and fall of the Mega Drive through examining each one of its games, as well as the major events in the gaming industry during its lifetime. Each episode will cover five titles, with new episodes coming out as fast as I can produce them.
Please check out Episode 1, and enjoy!
Featured Games:
- Space Harrier II
- Super Thunder Blade
- Altered Beast
- Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijo
- Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Before they became known as the fathers of the real-time strategy genre, Westwood Studios (aka Westwood Associates, back in the day) was probably most well-known for this game. Eye of the Beholder, a dungeon-crawler set in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons universe, was their first big hit.
Set in the troubled city of Waterdeep, the game follows the exploits of a party of heroes hired by the Lords of the city to investigate an evil presence emanating from beneath the city. The group begins their quest in the sewers, where they are promptly trapped thanks to an inconveniently timed cave-in at the entrance.
What follows is a classic, PC-style dungeon crawl where monsters are battled, spells are learned, loot is collected and…well…you get the picture.
The titular Beholder is the game’s final boss, Xanathar. When I was researching this entry I was interested to learn that the original PC release of the game featured absolutely no fanfare when the Beholder was slain. Instead players were treated to a blue box with a bit of text, and then dumped back out to DOS. This was rectified in subsequent versions of the game, starting with the Amiga port.
What’s more strange is that Eye of the Beholder was widely praised for its cinematic intro (something that was quite rare at the time, considering games were published on floppy discs). The story goes that this was a judgement call by the game’s producers – the intro took up so much space that they decided to cut the planned ending sequence, as they figured most gamers would never get to that point anyway.
It’s a problem that still plagues game developers to this day: do you blow your load early and make sure everyone sees your most impressive work at the expense of a traditional climax? Or do you build to your best work over a series of hours and run the risk that a high percentage of your players will never experience the crescendo?
Like the previously-covered Dungeon Master II, Eye of the Beholder suffers from the PC-to-console controller syndrome. This game was designed to be controlled by a mouse. Everything from movement to combat requires on-screen buttons to be virtually pressed by a pointer. And doing this with a Genesis controller was a huge pain in the ass.
Luckily, the Sega CD version featured full support for Sega’s Mega Mouse, which was an official mouse peripheral for the Genesis. And wow, did it ever make this game supremely playable.
There is one other interesting tidbit about Eye of the Beholder on the Sega CD. Of all the ports of the game, the Sega CD version features an exclusive soundtrack by none other than Yuzo Koshiro, the man behind the insanely great tunes in games like Streets of Rage 2 and ActRaiser. Not only that, but this was his very first CD-based game soundtrack. And, as you would expect, it’s pretty damn good.
This week! More baby talk up front, then we launch into the game talk with Super Mario 3D Land, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Sonic Generations, Uncharted 3 (SPOILERS from 54:25 to 1:03:10), Jurassic Park, Rayman Origins, and Skyrim.
Own an iPhone/iPod touch? We’ve got an app for that–the Player One Podcast player app is available now. Play shows new and old, read show notes, access the show Twitter, website, email, voicemail line and more! Plus, you’ll be able to access bonus audio and video content (soon, once we figure out what that is). Click here to download.
Publisher: Sega Deep Water
Developer: Sega Interactive Development Division
Release: 1995
Mankind is doomed. These are the end times.
The downfall of mankind can be directly traced to the untimely deaths of a few key individuals. In an effort to rectify this situation, the Eternal Champion – a god-like, time traveling entity who is the protector of the balance of good – has snatched these individuals at the moment of their deaths. They are to be entered into a tournament, the winner of which will have the chance to go back to their lives and affect changes that will ultimately reverse mankind’s end.
Challenge From the Dark Side is the first and only sequel to 1993′s Eternal Champions, which was a US-developed fighting game exclusive to the Genesis – Sega’s way to cash in on the fighting game craze at the time.
Challenge From the Dark Side features all nine combatants from the original game, as well as four new faces: Dawson, Ramses III, Raven and Riptide. As an added ripple, players are introduced to the Dark Champion, who is the protector of the balance of evil. He has been hiding four combatants of his own, and has decided that now is the time to reveal them. Like the original group, these four have a part to play in the reversal of mankind’s fate.
Eternal Champions was a pretty successful game, all things considered. The fighting game arena was dominated by Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat back in the day, and while Sega managed to get the latter on their system in a timely manner, the former was a SNES exclusive for quite a while. So you could kind of consider Eternal Champions their answer to Street Fighter II in the same way that the Streets of Rage series was an answer to the SNES exclusivity of Final Fight.
The time-travelling storyline allowed for some pretty fantastic characters in the Eternal Champions universe. You’ve got everything from a cave man to an Atlantean to an Egyptian Pharoah facing off against a coporate assassin, Russian acrobat, cybernetically enhanced kickboxer and a 1920′s era mobster.
Most of the fighting styles in Eternal Champions were based on real-life martial arts, much like Street Fighter II. There were still a lot of fantastical moves, but overall the combat feels very grounded in realism.
And yet the game also features moves akin to Mortal Kombat’s infamous Fatalities. The original Eternal Champions featured location-based Overkills, where taking down an opponent at a specific spot in the stage would set them up for a gruesome death, such as getting knocked into a lion’s cage or electrocuted by a neon sign.
Challenge From the Dark Side took it a bit further, though. The game introduced Sudden Deaths, where a character with 15% or less life left could suddenly die under specific circumstances – in Larcen’s stage the ticket lady at the theatre will bust out a gun and shoot the loser to death.
Vendettas are pretty much like Fatalities, in that a character could perform a specific button combination in front of a dizzied opponent in order to take them out in a suitably grizzly fashion.
Finally, there were the Cinekills. Here the Dark Champion appears in a pre-rendered video and kills the losing character in a way which supposedly represents their worst fears.
Anyway, enough talk about death. Eternal Champions was a fun, inspired fighter. The Genesis game was a bit too difficult for my tastes, but Challenge From the Dark Side introduced a difficulty setting that somewhat alleviated the problem.
And, of course, the game played a thousand times better when using Sega’s fantastic 6-button controller. Those stuck with the standard 3-button pad had to use the start button to toggle between punches and kicks. This was pretty standard on most fighting games for the system.
Eternal Champions has been pretty much forgotten by those were weren’t into the game back in the day, but has a real cult following as well. Probably none so much as the unreleased Eternal Champions for the Sega Saturn.
Advertised on the back of the Saturn’s box, this final game in the trilogy never made it out of pre-production. According to Executive Producer and Designer Michael Latham, the game was to have introduced a third being that represented Chaos, and the dark and light combatants from the previous games were to have worked together to restore time and space. Latham claims that the game was canceled because Sega of Japan felt that the series would draw too much attention from the Virtua Fighter series, which had become a flagship franchise for them.
There were a couple of Eternal Champions spin-offs, though. X-Perts on the Genesis chronicled the exploits of assassin Shadow Yamamoto. In this alternate timeline she survives the attempt on her life (perhaps she won the tournament?) and puts together a team of assassins tasked with ending the corporate corruption that lead to the assassination attempt in the first place.
The second game is Chicago Syndicate. This side-scrolling beat-em-up for the Game Gear follows the story of Larcen Tyler – the mobster originally murdered in the 1920s. Like Shadow, in his spin-off he has survived the attempt on his life and it has turned him into an anti-mob crusader.
Challenge From the Dark Side also represents the first use of Sega’s Deep Water publishing label. The label was meant to signify games that featured adult content (obviously we’re talking about violence, here). This is the first of only three games ever to use the label, the other two being the aforementioned X-Perts and 1997′s Duke Nukem 3D on the Sega Saturn.
Eternal Champions: Challenge From the Dark Side is one of the true gems of the Sega CD’s library. It represents not only what was great about the system, but about Sega in general.
Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
Developer: Ringler Studios
Release: 1994
Finally! We’ve reached the last of the ESPN sports games for the Sega CD from Sony Imagesoft. This is arguably the most important one of the group. After all, the NFL is pretty much like a religion in the US.
Sunday Night NFL is one of only two authentic NFL football games for the console (the other being Sega’s Joe Montana game). EA Sports never bothered releasing Madden on the Sega CD, though they did put out a disc version of Bill Walsh College Football.
And considering how bug-ridden Joe Montana ended up, I guess this is the best NFL game on the system by default. It’s too bad, then, that it’s such a bare-bones title – even with the NFL and ESPN licenses, Ringler Studios didn’t do much in the way of presentation here. The title screen doesn’t even have play any music. Heck, it doesn’t even tell you to press start. You figure that out when the game automatically launches into demo mode.
Sunday Night NFL features all 28 NFL teams from 1994, and gives players the option of playing a single game, a season, a playoff series, or the chance to play through the 1994 NFL schedule. The game also includes weather changes, and apparently the players actually react to changing weather, though I couldn’t really tell if this was the case.
Unfortunately, Sunday Night NFL does not have an NFLPA license, so none of the pro players are included in the game.
The game itself plays pretty well considering how old it is. Graphics and presentation are very reminiscent of the Madden NFL series, with the same 3D, down-the-field view that series made popular. Play calling is interesting, too, in that players could choose from nine offensive plays with single button presses. I think this is actually six more than the Madden quick-select menus offered at the time, so in that regard, the ESPN game is actually a bit more advanced.
Honestly, though, with such a spartan presentation and nothing particularly great happening on the field, ESPN Sunday Night NFL doesn’t leave much of an impression. Not necessarily a bad game, just forgettable.
This week! Some baby talk up front (bear with us) then we launch into the game talk with Super Mario 3D Land, Batman: Arkham City (SPOILERS from 26:25 to 37:40), Uncharted 3 (SPOILERS up to Chapter 17 through 53:30), Jurassic Park, Halo Anniversary, Kinect Disneyland Adventure, Rayman Origins and Saints Row: The Third.
Own an iPhone/iPod touch? We’ve got an app for that–the Player One Podcast player app is available now. Play shows new and old, read show notes, access the show Twitter, website, email, voicemail line and more! Plus, you’ll be able to access bonus audio and video content (soon, once we figure out what that is). Click here to download.
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