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

Last week with the PS1, we entered August 1996 with The Hive, Triple Play 97, Worms, and NFL Full Contact.

Last time with the 3DO wasn't all fun and games when we trudged further through our list of 1994 games with DinoPark Tycoon, Drug Wars, FIFA International Soccer, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, and Fun 'n Games.

Now, our journey continues through the dusty, lawless backwater that is the 3DO in '94 with Gridders, Guardian War, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, Mad Dog McCree, and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold.

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

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Gridders

Developer: Tetragon

Publisher: Tetragon

Release Date: 1994

Time to Doing The Griddy: 24 Minutes

We kick things off with one of our few 3DO Puzzle games, and it's a unique one. The random legacy of this title is more interesting as trivia than anything else, so we'll save that for the end and get straight to my attempt at describing it.

So, for convoluted and inconsequential reasons, you play as a guy who has to navigate through an extremely hazardous and fully automatic factory in the far-flung future of 2049. This factory seems to employ and/or make a variety of cubes which perpetually move around on large, featureless grids with no discernable purpose. These grids comprise the 30 or so levels, with the goal of each one being to collect some number of thingies without getting crushed under a moving cube. Most levels will have those needed collectibles inside certain cubes, and those cubes will need to be obstructed before they drop them. There are moveable boxes, and some cubes don't run you over, so hopefully you can see where the puzzling comes into play. That's a workable premise for a game, a self-moving Sokoban that wants to kill you. The problem is that it doesn't work that well in practice.

There are two primary issues which combine to ruin the experience. First, your guy moves painfully slow, and the controls just don't feel good or responsive, which is a real accomplishment considering how few inputs this game requires. That combines with the titular grids being absolutely enormous, which creates an experience that feels like a sluggish Frogger. Second, there are only two camera views, up-close isometric and zoomed-out isometric. Considering the size of the grid and speed of the moving cubes, that counts as the bare minimum to make this anywhere near playable. Cubes come and go from all four sides and don't always go in straight lines, which creates frequent situations where your view gets obstructed or it's visually unclear which exact space a cube is going to go. When these issues combine it turns the whole exercise into an irritating slog.

That's a shame, since this is, again, a fundamentally sound concept. A vision pops into my head of a game using this basic premise, except the levels are a quarter the size, there's more of them, you can rotate the camera, and it's in a Nintendo DS-era chibi artstyle. Adding in fully grid-based movement and a top-down minimap turns that vision into something that would a legitimate cult classic barring any issues in puzzle design. Someone has to have made that, right? Anyway, I'll chalk this up as an interesting failure, which isn't too bad considering how small-time Tetragon was as a studio. It's hard to find details, but I think this was their first game, and we're going to see them a couple more times before it's all said and done. Now here’s the trivia: while Tetragon would only last a handful of years, its founder, Mark Skaggs, would go on to produce a couple Command & Conquer games at EA before moving over to Zynga and leading the team that created Farmville of all things. This was the Farmville guy’s first game. The universe is a weird place like that sometimes.

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Guardian War

Developer: Microcabin

Publisher: Panasonic

Release Date: 1994

Time to Tanking With The Healer: 75 Minutes

No one thinks of the 3DO in relation to RPGs, and most people who are aware of the system wouldn't think there are any on it at all. Yet there were six RPGs released for this thing in North America, split evenly between western and Japanese developers. Of those, we already saw a trash-tier Dungeon Crawler with AD&D: Slayer, and now we have our first Japanese Role-Playing Game, though this one is its own weird, unique thing entirely. When I say it's weird, I mean it's made by our friends at Microcabin. If you don't recall, they've previously been covered with our looks at Mystaria and Life Stage. 'Eclectic' is probably the nicest way I could describe their output, and now we have one more game to add to the pile with Guardian War.

This technically counts as a Strategy RPG along the lines of Fire Emblem or Shining Force. You have multiple units who you maneuver around various combat fields which each need to be cleared of enemies, with each unit having their own names, level progression, and inventories. Yet, because Microcabin wanted to flex what limited 3D rendering tech was inside the 3DO, the units and enemies are all polygonal, and as such the game doesn't use the standard top-down view. A 3D game requires a 3D camera, so you have to control this whole thing from a behind-the-back third-person view. Also, the polygonal models are primitive, the environment is decorated with digitized photos, and the draw distance is very limited. Really, this thing looks like a nightmare when you aren't hands-on with it, but somehow handles the important parts of the gameplay well enough to be entirely playable. That's not saying this is a normal experience, the balance of mechanics and features which are present versus the ones which aren't is completely bananas, and you aren't likely to find a good point of comparison even to this day.

The combat fields are organized in a world map suspiciously reminiscent of Koei Strategy games like Nobunaga's Ambition or Romance of the Three Kingdoms. When you enter one, your only goal is to kill everything, which usually includes some kind of boss fight tucked away in a corner. After clearing a field, you can't reenter it, except for a couple of ones you find later on that exist just for grinding. There are a few towns you can visit after clearing a path on the map where you can do the usual buying and selling. Every now and then you come across a temple, where you acquire a new unit, with five units in total. There also might be some kind of monster recruitment mechanic, which would be wild if true. That overall structure is relatively lightweight and just enough to carry a game that's probably somewhere around 10 - 15 hours long.

The combat itself is, again, insane-looking, but all the movement is firmly grid-based, and the turn-based combat and class system make immediate sense for anyone who's touched a Strategy RPG before. Yet, there are a few wrinkles which betray the slapdash nature of this game. For example, you start with one unit who's a level 1 knight, and the first combat field is pretty much impossible going in solo. So, the map square before that field gives you your second unit, who is a level 4 healer. Since this game uses a 1 - 20 level range, that makes the healer heavily overpowered for something like the first three or four fields. When I say overpowered, I mean that the healer could probably be used to solo every fight without difficulty. Strategy RPGs have long had the habit of using chaperone characters in the early game who either leave or have their power levels taper off as time goes on, but this healer uses the same experience table as anyone else, so he's just overpowered.

Then there's the class system itself. The developers here would have seen the early Fire Emblem games and played Final Fantasy V, and someone at the studio had the bright idea to combine those two job systems. That leads to each unit in this game being able to equip any of the 9 classes, each of which can gain its own experience and eventually upgrade to an advanced class. But each unit can also equip two secondary classes that don't gain experience but offer abilities according to what is currently available for those classes. That's right, they literally one-upped FFV. This eventually turns the combat and character progression into kind of a lot; it's not deep, just very broad. This also would be untenable with a traditional one-and-done mission structure, but a loophole exists in this game where you can quit out of a field at any time and all your units will be fully healed and revived, keeping any money and experience they gained while the field itself resets. This creates a de facto ability to grind, which would break the early game if not for the onerous job system.

All of the mechanics and systems feel like they're held together with duct tape and prayer, which gives the game an unhinged feeling at its most fundamental level. That isn't helped by the, again, bizarre presentation and barely-there premise. Despite all that, it's still a functional video game and the best thing I've yet seen on the 3DO for as low a bar as that is. Contemporary reviewers didn't seem sure what to do with this thing either, with some giving passing marks for being coherent and others repulsing off how weird it is. Regardless, no one bothered to buy it because this is still the 3DO we're talking about. I hesitate to call Guardian War a good game, but I feel comfortable announcing it as the first full-fledged (mostly unironic) forgotten gem for the system. It only took fifty games to get here.

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Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller

Developer: Take-Two Interactive

Publisher: GameTek

Release Date: 1994

Time to Going To Hell: 65 Minutes

Kids these days love hell. They're all into that devil music and pentagrams and those Satan-worshipping video games, the TV told me so it must be true. Or, at least, that's what someone might have said to the cynical opportunists at the fledgling Take-Two Interactive in the early 90's. Regardless of the inspiration, they had the idea to cash in on the multimedia bubble and the innate appeal of hell with their second-ever game. This thing has it all for a multimedia Adventure game of the time, overuse of bad pre-rendered CG, misguided-to-nonexistent puzzle design, exceptionally stupid writing, borrowed legitimacy from a few recognizable actors, and edge. There's already a highly detailed write-up of the PC version of this thing over on Giant Bomb dot com, you might have heard of it, and I'm not going to attempt to relitigate all the minutiae discussed there. Instead, I'll just give my impressions of Hell: A Thrilling Cyberpunk Story before I run screaming into the night.

The year 1994 was located right in the center of a shitstorm caused by the converging forces of post-Myst Adventure games, Interactive Movies, and multimedia chicanery. Knowing that, we shouldn't be too surprised by any of what we see in this game. Except for a couple of FMV characters, everyone here is represented with unemotive, janky looking pre-rendered CG and the environments somehow look worse. It's possible to do something with that tech, but someone at Take-Two was convinced that the story, which I can't even begin to explain, was important enough for most of the runtime to be spent with shot-reverse-shot dialogue scenes, interspersed with basic puzzles and dubious action sequences. The voice actors do what they can with the material they're given, with the top-billed supporting cast, anchored by Grace Jones and Dennis Hopper, really going for it on every line read. So much so that the inability of the character models to emote grows more and more grating as the game goes on. I would much rather watch these actors chew the scenery in silly outfits than stare at sub-Reboot CG models with bad mouth-flapping.

I haven't explained the plot, which revolves around an outlandish vision of America's impending fascist theocracy and a conspiracy that unravels like a story written by a lobotomized Philip K. Dick. There are plenty of weirdos and freaks among the supporting cast, which props up needed interest since the two playable characters have all the appeal of soiled paper bags. Even then there isn't anything compelling going on here, which gives you no incentive to press on when encountering the slightest friction in the puzzle design. Even still, I intentionally forced myself through the first hour just so I could 1) see both Dennis Hopper and Grace Jones and 2) go to hell. I quit immediately after accomplishing those goals and left underwhelmed. If you want more details, I implore you to check out the above linked blog.

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Mad Dog McCree

Developer: American Laser Games

Publisher: American Laser Games

Release Date: 1994

Time to Doing Unpadded Stunts: 10 Minutes

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Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold

Developer: American Laser Games

Publisher: American Laser Games

Release Date: 1994

Time to Ya Missed It: 10 Minutes

This alphabetical format is finally biting me square on the ass. We have an American Laser Games classic and its forgotten sequel, both released in the same year sans specific date. The structure, gameplay, and quality for both of these is in-line with what we saw in the two Crime Patrol games, which is to say they're bad and unplayable without a light gun. In fact, there's such slight difference in the gameplay between each of these things, that I've ended up ranking them according to how racist they are. For the record, I saw the least racism in Mad Dog McCree, followed by Crime Patrol, Mad Dog II, and then Drug Wars.

Getting to the two Mad Dog games specifically, they're both FMV Light Gun games with all the AGL hallmarks. Though, because the first entry was their first commercial game, it's much simpler both structurally and in the footage. You can tell that they obtained use of some recreated Old West town, hired some low-cost stunt guys, and shot everything in like two days. There's some charm to that, even if it is, again, unplayable for the typical d-pad reasons. You can tell that the sequel had more funding and experience behind it, with the use of multiple locations, different types of movement, and a wider variety of stuntpeople who fit into more racist outfits. The only interesting thing I noticed is that some of the scenarios you encounter in the first Mad Dog flow in a way which reminds me that AGL started off by making training programs for cops. There are some scenes where you're in a situation like, "which one of these guys is going to draw the gun?" and you need to shoot him before he shoots you. For some reason this thing has you exercising a higher level of restraint than the later Crime Patrol games, and if that fact doesn't serve as social commentary, then I don't know what will.

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The 3DO truly is a land of extremes, only some of which are physically playable. Anyway, lets update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and mosey outta this here saloon,

1. Guardian War

…

17. Gridders

37. Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller

47. Mad Dog McCree

50. Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold

…

53. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties

Next time we meet, it'll be back to the PS1 in '96 when we look at Tecmo Super Bowl, Madden NFL '97, Jumping Flash! 2, and Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack's Revenge.

When we return to the 3DO, we're going to at least look at Mind Teazzer, Night Trap, Novastorm, and PaTaank. I'm still deciding what to do about NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet! I know that 3DO games automatically qualify as sick filth, but there are real content considerations that need to be made. We'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

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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. Currently, I'm inching ever closer to the end of Legend of Grimrock 2.

The games featured in this post can be viewed in the stream archive below.