An explanation of what we're doing here can be found in the introduction post.

Last time, we theoretically continued our non-chronological journey with the 3DO through 1994 with DinoPark Tycoon, Drug Wars, FIFA International Soccer, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, and Fun 'n Games.

When we were last with the PS1, we made our way through to the end of July 1996 with Robo Pit, Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Star Fighter, and Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness.

We're now exiting July and entering August '96 with The Hive, Triple Play '97, Worms, and NFL Full Contact.

**This post is also featured on my site, fifthgengaming.blog, and can be found here.**

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The Hive

Developer: Trimark

Publisher: Trimark

Release Date: 7/27/1996

Time to Getting Legitimately Pissed Off: 20 Minutes

Rebel Assault sold really well back in the '90's; like, unreasonably well. It was enough to establish the Rail-Shooter/QTE hybrid as one of the three styles of gameplay which dominated the multimedia craze, with the other ones being Myst-like Adventure games and Zito-inspired FMV Interactive Movies. Though, the Rebel Assault style died out the fastest and left the least impression on video gaming. It's a simple matter to answer why that was the case, every game using that framework was unplayable garbage. Today's supporting evidence for that theory is the PS1 port of 1995's The Hive.

This game tells the disjointed story of a space super spy who gets caught up in a space conspiracy involving ancient aliens and the space mafia. The events of that tale are told mostly through Rail Shooter sequences with the occasional on-foot puzzle/QTE section thrown in for flavor. The graphics are all pre-rendered CG and more effort was put into the score than the project deserved. So, yeah, it's Cyberia in space; though, Cyberia is just Rebel Assault with polygons and 'tude. This entire genre is the poisoned fruit of a cursed tree.

It should go without saying that this thing plays like stale ass. The targeting reticule moves too slowly with the d-pad to account for the targets as they fly at you, while somehow also being imprecise enough to not allow for tracking of a target when you're able get it there. There are some one-off gameplay wrinkles added on top of the standard rail shooting, but they're all bad. Maybe this worked better with a mouse when it was released for the newfangled Windows 95™ operating system, but it super does not work here. I could lay into a myriad of small nits, but there's no reason to when those nits are orbiting a dumpster. Now I just have the thankless task of figuring out where this sits in comparison to the rest of the genre.

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Triple Play '97

Developer: EA Canada

Publisher: EA Sports

Release Date: 7/31/1996

Time to A Barry Bonds Home Run: 49 Minutes

The rise of EA Sports is worth knowing about, as a cautionary tale if for no other reason. After the breakout success of Madden Football's Genesis conversion in 1990, which combined the simulation heavy Apple II original with the arcade-y gameplay elements which were expected on consoles, EA started a multi-year run of Madden-izing as many popular sports as they could get their hands on. They converted a PGA Tour game they had published to their new mold for a Genesis release in '91 and threw together an NHL game using the Madden engine that same year. After that they spent a year sorting out how to manage multiple yearly sports series and SNES publishing before really starting their expansion. EA Sports branched out to FIFA and NCAA Football in '93, the NBA in '94, and MLB in '95. There were a few misfires along the way involving the Mutant League sub-brand and Rugby, but we don't need to worry about those. The important thing is that over a five-year period EA stood up annualized game franchises for seven different sport leagues with shared technology and a semi-unified design philosophy. An impressive feat that would ruin Sports games for decades to come.

By our current time in mid-1996, the EA Sports brand had two primary qualities going for it. First, EA did everything they could to officially license their games to get real team and athlete names. That's a huge deal, as most developers had previously been unable to fully license their sports games, which was initially a result of the fly-by-night nature of 8-bit development and later probably due to EA being EA. Still, that alone put these games in the top tier of their genre, which could only be matched by the biggest players in console development. Second, EA's tech consistently focused on looking better than their peers. EA Sports titles were going to look the best in screenshots and ads, come hell or high water. That's one of the contributing factors to why Madden and NHL didn't show up on new consoles in '95; the studios didn't get the tech fully there in time, so they bumped those a year and only put out their PGA, FIFA, and NBA titles. These long-term advantages were enough to allow EA to gradually pave over the subgenres for most of those sports. In the early 90's most of the major sports had between 5-8 active franchises on consoles, at the turn of the century it was down to 3-6 and by the late 00s it was 1-2. Then after cornering the market EA went and collapsed in on itself during the 2010's, resulting in the current, barren environment. That outcome is closely tied to my primary issue with the core EA Sports design philosophy.

Trying to make a sports game with sim tech and action gameplay sabotages both goals, especially in the early days. Having elements inspired by the old PC sports sims meant promising realistic gameplay and deep control options, while aligning with arcade-inspired console standards required simple controls and rulesets that allow quick onboarding for any skill level. Balancing those requirements is precarious even with modern technology and practices and was almost impossible on old 16- or 32-bit systems. This caused the early games to lean more towards action gameplay, but with enough sim elements to keep up appearances, allowing for wide appeal. But as time went on and technology improved, EA backed themselves into the corner of relying on their promises of realism to maintain their edge, which led to sacrificing accessibility and catering to a progressively harder core of players or else dropping franchises entirely. In my opinion, this is what ruined sports games as a whole, since the more successful EA became the more their competitors had to play by their rules. This is all largely incidental to Triple Play '97, but it does give a little background to my issues with this damned thing.

Triple Play '97 is EA's second swing at the Baseball genre and their first on a 32-bit console. It has every feature and game mode possible for the time, has licenses for both teams and players, and uses EA's next-gen Virtual Stadium™ engine. The virtual baseball guys are solidly polygonal, the Virtual Stadiums are the best in the business, and this thing has better sound design than its contemporaries. That's all fine and good, but at some point, you have to play baseball and that's where the trouble begins. This thing has a Wing Commander III number of inputs, with the already busy UI doing nothing to alleviate the convolution. This isn't a Fighting game or hardcore Flight Sim; players shouldn't need to tape a cheat sheet to their TV just to play baseball. Even after you make your way up the steep learning curve, the actual AI, physics, and game flow are completely borked. First, there's the all-too-familiar trap of AI players batting .900, which makes some sense in an arcade-style game, because players will also overperform, but this isn't one of those. This is exacerbated by the fact that it's nearly impossible to hit a foul. The AI will never do it and a player would really have to try to get one. Then there's the relative speed and movement of everything when fielding, which is reminiscent of a Bases Loaded game more than anything. Everything about the feel of the gameplay is off. Every aspect of playing this thing is cumbersome and unpleasant.

This is clearly not a simulation, but it puts an onus on the player as though it is. In this way it serves as a perfect example of the flaws in EA Sports' design philosophy of the time. Some sports can survive this kind of transition to video game form relatively intact. Hockey (if it exists) and soccer are good examples, but the vagaries of baseball don't survive this treatment. It shouldn't be surprising that this was a PC-first franchise, and that it was designed with that interface in mind. So much so that the PC version reviewed very well at the time. EA probably gets things figured out eventually, since this franchise will survive to the HD era, but man this game is miserable.

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Worms

Developer: Eidos Interactive

Publisher: Ocean Software

Release Date: 8/7/1996

Time to Getting Brainwormed: 75 Minutes

Oh look, it's Worms. We last saw this game not too long ago on the Saturn, and this version is basically identical. After putting a combined two hours into this thing, I'm comfortable calling it the most conceptually solid Amiga game of all time. I've sadly seen enough Amiga ports that I could put together a reasonably informed top ten list for that platform. Ugh. Anyway, Worms being Worms, the singleplayer is unfair, only half the weapons are useful, and the randomly generated maps are a crapshoot. You can see the fun though, as if it were a light at the end of a miasmic tunnel. This is the most "it is what it is" experience you can encounter, and I have nothing new to add to my previous commentary.

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NFL Full Contact

Developer: Robin Antonick Games

Publisher: Konami

Release Date: 8/10/1996

Time to Glitching Out The Grandstands: 44 Minutes

What a weird, broken failure of a thing. I would completely write this one off with something like two paragraphs if it weren't for the implications of its existence, so instead I'm going to write it off after three paragraphs. I'm confident in doing this because NFL Full Contact barely qualifies as anything. On paper, this is an NFL licensed Football game under Konami's ill-fated sports brand, which we last saw with the forgettabley bad Bottom of the Ninth and NBA in the Zone. Yes, I know Goal Storm is also there but it's a special case. While those other games would see follow-ups, this one has been intentionally memory-holed by everyone who was involved with it. My guess is that several things went sideways behind the scenes during development, which I'm basing on the fact that it feels like the most unfinished game I've seen so far.

Starting the game leads to the only menu screen in the whole experience, which looks like a cleaned-up debug menu. There's one game mode, which is single game. You select the teams, decide whether you want sound, and begin the game. From here you can see that the graphics are about as half-baked as possible, with goalposts not loading from half field and the worst crowd textures I've yet seen. From there the one positive thing about the game appears, which is that the offensive gameplay is fully functional. The playbook is up to contemporary standards and the ball usually does what you want it to do. But that all flips when playing defense. The friendly and opposing AI just aren't built to handle this kind of thing and the defensive controls feel terrible. Neither the player nor the AI can stop the ball. In a lot of ways, the flow reminds me of NBA in the Zone, WHICH ISN'T HOW FOOTBALL IS SUPPOSED TO WORK. On most levels, this thing fails as a Football game. I know that 1995's NFL GameDay also had barebones options, but it has a more fleshed out gameplay experience than this, and that game was a rushed launch title. There's no excuse for this thing coming to market in this state, and I can only imagine what caused this catastrophe.

While there are no details, there is plenty of fodder for insinuation. The smoking gun is in the name of the development studio. Robin Antonick was the programmer on the original couple of Apple II Madden games and played a large role in the creation of that series. That information isn't easy to come across, since Antonick and EA parted ways right as the EA Sports label was starting to take off and his presence has been pretty thoroughly scrubbed. All things considered, I'm going to guess it wasn't a happy departure. At some point in the following years, he must have ended up in a deal with Konami to make a Football game, which would have made some sense seeing as how he was the guy who made Madden. The result was Antonick starting up an eponymous studio, releasing this game, and immediately shuttering that studio. Everyone involved quietly moved on from this project. Yet, this game was released in direct competition with Madden '97, so it really feels like there's a story behind this endeavor that should be told. I'm not the one to tell that story, but still.

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Well, that was a bad time. Sometimes there's good stuff, and sometimes you get sports games that have been forgotten for a reason. Regardless, we are obligated to update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get out of here.

1. Air Combat

…

46. Worms

71. Triple Play '97

87. NFL Full Contact

111. The Hive

…

115. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition

Next time we see each other, our 1994 3DO misadventures will continue with Gridders, Guardian War, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, Mad Dog McCree, and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold. One of these will take the top slot in the 3DO rankings. Which one? Check back in to find out!

When we come back to the PS1, we discover that Fall doesn't actually begin until September, but game season begins with Madden and we're finally kicking off '96 when we look at Tecmo Super Bowl, Madden NFL '97, Jumping Flash! 2, and Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack's Revenge.

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You can find me streaming two or three times a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. There, we're looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I happen to be streaming. I recently fell into a random NiGHTS hole, and I'll eventually beat Legend of Grimrock 2.

You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.

This is art!

@personz: It really captures the true essence of the medium.