An explanation of what's going on here can be found in the intro post.

Last week we looked at our middle batch of PS1 games from July 1996 with Robo Pit, Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Star Fighter, and Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness.

Last time with the 3DO we picked back up with the 1994 release catalog with Another World (Out of This World), Cannon Fodder, Club 3DO: Station Invasion, Corpse Killer, and Cowboy Casino.

Now, we're (theoretically) continuing down the list of 1994 games with DinoPark Tycoon, Drug Wars, FIFA International Soccer, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, and Fun 'n Games.

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

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DinoPark Tycoon

Developer: Manley & Associates

Publisher: MECC

Release Date: 1994

Time to N/A: 9 Minutes

We've looked at several games that encountered serious performance issues on my totally real, legal, and legitimate 3DO Interactive Multiplayer system, such as Alone in the Dark, which has completely borked audio when running on my emulator genuine hardware. Yet, none of those games have been broken enough to be completely non-functional. That makes today a special day, as we've hit our first fatally compromised game in this series! *Air horn*

DinoPark Tycoon suffers a severe visual glitch where the background elements are compressed to the top quarter of the screen. I can still theoretically click around in the resulting void if I know where things are, but I don't, so I can't. This one is a complete wash; I can't even rank this experience. All I can tell you is what I found out from some surface level research. Turns out this developer was active in the early-90's edutainment industry, with this game originally seeing release for PCs in 1993. I assume the dinosaur theme is here to ride on the coattails of the Jurassic Park craze. From what I can guess, the gameplay is like a toned-down Theme Park but with some educational material about dinosaurs thrown in. That sounds like an adequate experience by 3DO standards, but oh well. Fun fact: Manley & Associates were the people responsible for that infamous The Wizard of Oz SNES game, and they were eventually bought by EA to spend the late 90's porting the Need for Speed sequels to PC before getting shut down. There isn't any point to that information, I just thought it was mildly interesting.

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Drug Wars

Developer: American Laser Games

Publisher: American Laser Games

Release Date: 1994

Time to Losing The War On Drugs: 10 Minutes

Now for a pile of garbage that is somehow even more cursed than that previous, literally unplayable video game. We've seen American Laser Games before on the 3DO with Crime Patrol in 1993 and hated it. I thought that was the last I would have to think about that game, but it turns out the full title of this thing is Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars, and it features all the same issues, but worse!

Instead of being a bad FMV Light Gun Shooter themed with generic self-serious copaganda, this uses the exact same structure and mechanics to take the player through a deranged right-wing murder fantasy that would have made Tom Clancy blush. Though, I suppose it's a thin line between the two. That's all there is to talk about here, because when I said the gameplay is identical to the first game, I wasn't exaggerating. It has the same structure of four chapters with four missions each, scaling in severity as it goes on with standard light gun mechanics. It even continues, and in some ways exacerbates, the problem from Crime Patrol of being unplayable with a gamepad. The first game was practically unplayable due to the d-pad cursor speed, but this one is literally unplayable because the guys you need to shoot pop out faster, are further away from the camera, and more spread apart than before, making even the early levels physically impossible without the 3DO light gun peripheral. Just from a technical perspective this is as lazy and irresponsible as a port can get.

The FMV content itself is somehow even lazier and more irresponsible than the gameplay. Even if you brush off the overarching plot about hunting down a Columbian drug lord and the extremely dubious racial depictions therein, there's still the mission content itself. Presenting a scenario of modern police rolling up on some building and blasting everyone who pops out with the justification, "there's drugs in there" like it's a fun shooting gallery served then and serves now as accidental social commentary about the role of policing in America. The production and acting is intentionally campy in an attempt to sell itself as comedic, and maybe for a certain type of guy it would be, but it comes across like someone who expresses a heinous opinion only to sell it off as a joke when they see no one agree with them. I mentioned with the last game that wild west style shooting galleries don't translate to modern settings, and it was misguided to attempt it. After seeing American Laser Games double down this hard on the concept, I can only conclude that the rancid content is the point. AGL dumped a lot of garbage onto the 3DO, so we have that to look forward to, but thankfully the bastards go out of business in '96 and won't factor into other 32-bit systems.

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FIFA International Soccer

Developer: Extended Play Productions

Publisher: EA Sports

Release Date: 1994

Time to Letting The Game Play Itself: 33 Minutes

It's time to play FIFA. You know, that FIFA. There's only one FIFA so you should immediately know what I'm talking about. It's 1994 and there's only the one FIFA, marking the first, and so far only, foray into soccer by the Madden guys. Well, this is more like a revamped up-port of the Genesis version, which came out in '93. That version sold well, apparently, on the back of EA's impressive looking sports game engine on 16-bit systems and the novelty of its sim features, but I dunno. The controls are inelegant, and it isn't much fun, I can't see EA's soccer efforts bear much fruit beyond this game once the initial wow-factor wears off. I mean, it's not like they're going to turn this into a yearly franchise, right?

As for this 3DO version, they took the Genesis release, and popped the sprites up into the third dimension, allowing for numerous camera angles in a way that was new and different for the time. Some extremely pointless footage of historical soccer moments was thrown in as well, because they had a lot of extra Mb to burn. That might have made this the best or second-best version of the game at the time, and that was enough to move a few systems in Europe. I'm not particularly enthused because the base gameplay isn't fun. It seems that early EA Sports games tried to fill a niche of being semi-simulation games. They would have the nicest graphics, convoluted control options, and as much physics as possible, but the AI couldn't keep up with putting on a realistic game flow and those sim aspects cratered accessibility. Not having grown up on sports games, I can't tell whether EA ever figured out the concept of fun or if players just adjusted their expectations over time.

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Flashback: The Quest for Identity

Developer: Delphine Software

Publisher: U.S. Gold

Release Date: 1994

Time to Jumping Into A Pit: 28 Minutes

Let's get back to the topic we stuck a pin into last week. Getting into this further will require digging a little bit into the background of Another World. That game was created almost solely by Eric Chahi, who had been a small, independent PC developer in the 80's before loosely working on some stuff with the small French studio Delphine, itself comprising Paul Cuisset and a few other people, on one of its Amiga games in 1989. Chahi took his payday from that work and spent the better part of two years hyperfocusing on his pet project, the aforementioned Another World. When it came time to wrap it up and do anything with the end product, he turned to Cuisset and Delphine to get it on shelves in '91. It sold more than anything anyone involved had seen before and would spend the following three years getting ported to every possible platform, including, as we saw, the 3DO. That's a nice and straightforward story, but then there's Flashback.

The thing we're looking at now is a 2D Adventure-Action game (not Action-Adventure because you do more adventuring than anything else) made using the techniques that Chahi had originally backwards-engineered from the old Mechner rotoscoped games. The thing is, Chahi wasn't involved with this game, but it's instead the brainchild of Cuisset. I didn't find anything online indicating any drama or ill-will, though. By all appearances, It seems like Chahi completely moved on to other things after finishing Another World and left Cuisset to do with it as he pleased, which would also explain why he was uninvolved in that bad direct sequel which was eventually released for the Sega CD. Yet, even without there being anything bad going on behind the scenes, the idea that they took something with artistic merits rarely seen in the medium at the time, stripped it for parts, and built those parts into a normal, kinda bad video game offends me on some deep level. But that argument requires an explanation of Flashback.

This game sees you play as some future guy named Conrad, who's escaping from some alien guys on a forested planet. He's apparently a super cool secret agent who had his memory wiped exactly like in Total Recall. It's a game from '92, so most of the story is in the manual. You spend your time wandering around semi-open 2D levels engaging in severely poor platforming and middling combat. There's some adventure game puzzles which would have been kinda standard for the time, and plenty of instant-kill environment hazards; and unlike in Another World, the checkpointing here is incredibly ungenerous. This doesn't look or sound as interesting as its predecessor, and the action-platforming gameplay demands way too much from the clunky controls inherent in this kind of rotoscoped game. The most obviously neat parts of how this tech makes the game look and animate are still here and would have been very noteworthy to the 99% of players who hadn't heard of the previous game. Also, despite being made in half the time, Flashback is something like 3x longer than Another World, I'm guessing because it was made by an actual team, and that would have mattered a lot back in the day.

So, yeah. Not a lot of individual merit, and I dislike the creative underpinning of the whole thing. This 3DO version would have run much better than the SNES or Genesis versions, but it also would have been a two-year-old game by this point, so that wouldn't have mattered for much. Oh, and I have an additional axe to grind because I previously attempted to play the sequel to this thing, Fade to Black, and that game is hot trash. After two interconnected reviews regarding Delphine Software, I don't really have a profound lesson to end on, so, uh, I guess don't let French people make video games.

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Fun 'n Games

Developer: Williams Entertainment

Publisher: Panasonic

Release Date: 1994

Time to Finding The Fun: 52 Minutes

Everyone here likes fun, and some of us even like games. But do we like Fun 'n Games? Probably not. This here is a minigame collection targeted towards small children, which also means it's basically shovelware. Though, oddly enough, not 3DO original shovelware. What's available here is a complete rebuild of the 1993 game of the same name which was released to no fanfare on the SNES and Genesis. When I tell you that no one bought it, what I mean is that the SNES cart of this thing is like the 30th rarest game for that system and fetches around $80USD for a complete in box copy as of 2024. The other notable piece of trivia is that the original developers, Leland Interactive Media, were also responsible for Double Dragon V, which is a beloved classic.

The main options here are to paint, make music, play minigames, and styyyyyyyle. The paint and music options are knock-offs of what you could have found in Mario Paint and are only notable for some of the more out-there patterning options in the coloring book. There are five minigames, none of which are memorable. Those include stuff like a bad Pac-Man mode, a bad scrolling shooter, and some other junk that I've already forgotten and don't care enough to go back and check in the stream archive. The games in Fun 'n Games are worth nothing. Then there's Style. This is supposed to be a kind of dress-up doll mode, but it only just leads to horrors beyond comprehension. The only positive thing I can say is that this game makes for great content when dicking around on a Twitch stream, which is the cause of my inflated minute count. Sometimes you have to wallow in your own filth.

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Let's just update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and pretend everything's going great.

1. Road Rash

…

17. FIFA International Soccer

32. Flashback: Quest for Identity

39. Fun 'n Games

47. Drug Wars

…

48. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Next time, we're going to switch over to the PS1 in the late Summer of 1996 by looking at The Hive, Triple Play 97, Worms, and NFL Full Contact.

After that it's right back with the 3DO in 1994, where we enter a hell of our own making with Gridders, Guardian War, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, Mad Dog McCree, and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold.

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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'm currently playing Legend of Grimrock 2 while maximizing my own pain and suffering for the enjoyment of others.

The stream archive featuring these games can be watched below.