3DO Interactive Multiplayer

Then joined issue Tiamat and Marduk, wisest of gods,
They swayed in single combat, locked in battle.
The lord spread out his net to enfold her,
The Evil Wind, which followed behind, he let loose in her face.
When Tiamat opened her mouth to consume him,
He drove the Evil Wind that she close not her lips.
As the fierce winds charged her belly,
Her body was distended and her mouth was wide open.
He released the arrow, it tore her belly,
It cut through her insides, splitting the heart.
Having thus subdued her, he extinguished her life.

Taken from the Enuma Elish the Babylonian Epic of creation. Circa 1200 BCE (Before common era)

Enuma Elish is an ancient Epic of creation. It talks at length about the creation of the Universe. Tiamat, considered by some to be a Dragon, a theory based on ancient descriptions of her, is also associated with celestial bodies and the female womb.

The proceeding elements of the story also suggests a much greater war. A celestial war. A war where Tiamat prepares various fighters and special astrologically inspired weapons are used.

What shape is Tiamat if not spherical? A single arrow could fire through her mouth, then her stomach, then her heart? One hell of an arrow or one hell of a woman.

Of cause the story has been borrowed. The story of St. George, patron Saint of England, reads similarly. Man defeats Dragon. Or closer to home if you prefer: Star Wars, man shoves special weapon through heart of Death Star. Or Starblade, someone, something, or whatever, destroys heart of alien ship. Heart of Octopus.

Burning Soldiers’ story has quite the bloodline then – accusing it of lack of originality in that department would have far reaching ramifications. After all, the Biblical version offers a nod to Tiamat – one way or another. (Perhaps this betrays previous hobbies before I was 3DO Kid?)

The Kaisertians, a race of aliens that have designs on the Earth for some 10,000 years, have decided, while the Earths Defence Force (EDF) is other wise predisposed, that they will invade Earth.

Starting off just a little East of Mars, the pre-rendered action will take you through an Asteroid field to destroy the Kaiser Ship. Once done, then it is back towards the Earth. A flight over desert and valley. A short battle over Tokyo, then a decent into the Earth core itself to fight the heart of evil - the Mu. All done in your special weapon 'Strike Fighter'.

18 sequences divided between 4 missions. You can have up to 4 players working via the 3DO controller daisy chained together.

Burning Soldier is another on-rails shooter, similar in more ways than one to Novastorm (Scavenger 4), Starblade and many, many others.

It is moderately entertaining and the difficulty is well balanced, making the game fun to play as well as being fun to watch.

The graphics aren’t as good as Starblade and lack the grandeur and clarity of the Namco offering but what it loses in eye-candy it makes up for in imagination and music.

Yes – I know the story is ‘borrowed’ – but it is all in the execution. While the Asteroid section has been done many times since Empire Strikes back and older, the over Earth sequences are pretty good and zipping around over the bay area of Tokyo and the valleys of Earth is done very nicely. It just a shame the field of view is so narrow and the image quality is so grainy.

The game play is challenging and not impossible. Often these types of game can become over whelming with more enemies than is possible to shoot, but Burning Soldier stave's it off well and the difficulty is balanced and even using the 3DO joypad doesn’t make matters worse. A nice touch is a small green arrow indicating the enemy target which is likely to cause you most trouble. Ignore the green arrow and you will be hit by an incoming missile, it should be pointed out that this doesn’t make the game overly simplistic because many targets will have the marker; it just makes you feel even stupider when you get hit.

The variety of enemy targets is far from inspiring but the end of level bosses are creative and moderately well animated, if a little easy to destroy. The weapons you have at you disposal are equally basic. A standard laser fire and a homing missile. The latter is deployed by holding the B button down for a period of time and then releasing - it is effective but while it is charging it is impossible to fire the main laser. It makes it interesting.

Judging by many peoples views of Burning Soldier on the Internet, this game should be the most lamentable piece of gaming software the world has ever seen, one UK magazine giving it 2 of 10. However, it isn’t. It’s not great. It’s not Grand Theft Auto 3, it’s not PGR but it’s not bad either. It is actually fun and can offer plenty of balanced Arcade fun.

On the rare-o-meter it scores a 0 out of 10 in this house. I have the PAL and the Japanese versions – for reasons I don’t remember!

…and I still don’t know why it is called ‘Burning Soldier’ – the ship you fly is called ‘Strike Fighter’ – probably sounded cooler in its original Japanese eh?

3DO Kid.

Graduation final.

I’ll start right off. This game needs to be translated to English. Needs! Do you hear me? Needs. It is a cultural education.

I’m rarely inspired by games. Elite inspired me. The inner-drugs dealer wanted to sell narcotics to aliens. GTA 3 inspired me. I wanted to steal cars from gangs. And most shooting games fulfil a spiritual need of mine. One that involves guns and those around me.

Graduation final inspired me too.

It starts off by asking a few basic questions. Name, date of birth …and blood type?

Blood type in Japan is similar in some ways to an Astrological symbol. A person bearing an A-type blood is one type of person and a B-type is another, an AB another and so on. My wife spent most of her life believing she was a B-type – something akin to social outcast in Japanese female high school mentality. As it turns out she’s an A+. Which is a lot better than being a B.

On closer inspection, and between near hysterical reams of laughter from me, it was a psychic that had told her in the first place she was B-type. So - Not much science behind the theory then. …but that is why it is asking for blood type!

Once personal data has been entered you must choose the type of teacher you will be and this is the first hint as to the type of game Graduation Final is and why the game carries a certificate 16 rating. You can choose to be a wealthy teacher, a physically strong one, an intelligent teacher, an attractive teacher and teacher bequeathed the mighty powers of persuasion.

Graduation Final is therefore a Role Playing Game of sorts. You take on the role of a high school teacher focusing on five female students.

Your job is to care for their educational and social development by organising their lesson and holidays, interviewing them to see what is going on in their lives and disciplining them if necessary and offering pearls of wisdom when confronted with not so typical student-teacher situations.

So far – so good.

Each student has a set of stats, such as attractiveness, ability to learn, popularity and language skills, etc., etc. These range from 0 to 100. Have a score of 100 and they are good in that area, zero and you, and they, are in trouble.

The game hinges on a cause and effect model. So try to improve a girls popularity and their HP goes down. Increase their work-load and their need for a break increases.

It is not easy and the effects of your inept tutoring skills will have a number of effects. Firstly your students will begin to crumble. Rebelling or psychologically sliding. Which invariably leads to smoking I descovered. Also, it affects your own stats. To counter balance, you set each girls educational week three days at a time – Monday to Wednesday and Thursday to Saturday.

This all of cause could become monotonous, an entire year of balancing timetables for high school girls. It begins, of cause, to sound like a chore.

Fortunately high school girls in Japan, like else where, are interested in more things than just study, study, study. Especially when these high schools lives have been crafted by the grubby imagination of certain Japanese game developers. I’m looking at you “Shar Rock”.

Drinking, smoking, earning money as escort girls and hangin' around beaches half naked posed significant problems for me as sensai and this is where things get interesting.

One of my wayward students was caught riding a wonderfully hand drawn motorbike, I as teacher was presented with three options.

1) Tell the student “Do as you please”
2) Tell the student “Wear a crash helmet and think about your parents”
3) Tell the student “Driving at night keeps people awake!”

I chose option 2 and her popularity went up 10 points – a damn fine bit of student teacher counselling if I do say-so myself.

On another occasion I bumped into one of my cute student looking a trifle bored. No problem, 3DO super teacher is here.

The options available to me were: Offer to take her for a drink, or tell her to watch out for the police, or voice concerns about my own well-being. I chose to offer to take her for a drink, to which she refused but her popularity at school went up by five points!?

On another occasion one of my flock had become cabaret dancer. In a bunny suit. As a teacher the option to tell her to get a proper part-time job was available or to act annoyed or to ask for a dance… Hmmm – guess which one I chose? And yes, her popularity went up too.

Every so often throughout the school year scheduled events will take place. We had a concert. Which was nice. I as teacher could choose the lead singer and the song and then some up beat Japanese pop music ensued. Of cause the lyrics appeared at the bottom of the screen – Karaoke style.

Another event was a sports day, in which my girls came forth out of five teams in a series of hurdle races and we also had two rounds of examinations. Once complete, each student was either rated as tadpole for dumb or a frog for intelligent. I’m not sure why and neither was Japanese assistant.

It is a bit like a stats only version of the Electronic Arts game the Sims or like a football management game only with high school girls and I was getting to really enjoy it.

However… I was playing the game with my good lady Japanese wife – who had, having read the wonderfully presented manual, voiced some concerns. Not about the morality but about what I may have been thinking about Japanese high schools and her having been one once.

I could see and so could she, through snorts of laughter and stares of utter disbelief, where this game may have been heading. I won’t spell it out.

If you can find a Japanese person, a 3DO and a copy of this game, I recommend you give it a go. It’s fun for an open, not too serious mind. And shouldn’t be considered a serious reflection of Japanese high school education – it is, so I understand, significantly less fun in real life. School after school every night anyone?

Not very rare and I think there is a copy on eBay right now!

3DO Kid.

Some games are incomprehensible because they are in a foreign language. Many are the times that I have stared with a blank expression, gawping at my TV screen, hoping, against all odds, that if I stare long enough Kanji will suddenly and magically become readable.

Forced because of my ignorance, to work methodically through the menu system, fantasying that I will hit a menu option that will convert the game to my native tongue. This, I should point out, has never happened. But hope springs eternal.

If I’m lucky, occasionally, a small female east-Asian accented voice will chirp up from their endless soppy-blog reading and lazily tell me to “Click there – you want to start the game right?”

Other games are incomprehensible because they are too complicated. You read the instructions. You look at the menus. You fiddle with the joypad but you are overwhelmed with a resolute desire not to be bothered.

Strahl is neither. The game is in English and it’s a simple ‘see icon’ press corresponding joypad button type of game.

So why, I guess you are wondering, is it getting the patent pending 3DO Kid ‘Megablog’ treatment?

Well – OK - The point of going through these games was to firstly tell people what I thought of the game and secondly provide more information than is generally available. Nothing exists for Strahl. The usual suspects have a few words – the wonderful Digital Press and a couple of other hobbyists like me but nothing too profound.

So - I can’t just say ‘it is good’ and leave it at that. Well – I could and I have but I know it is naughty.

So why am I bursting to tell you about Strahl? A game that first saw light on the Sega Mega-LD. (Laserdisc) and was also released in Japan on the Sega Saturn. Well, to be honest, I think there is a mystery here.

It’s a Laserdisc game (another?) and like all laser games it is a fairly short-lived affair. The whole game, from start to finish, takes about 15 minutes. From peasant boy Alex Huckfield to the King Alex Huckfield faster than John Prescott at all you can eat Pie and Chips buffet.

It also plays like Dragons Lair. Strahl says press left, you obligingly press left. Strahl says bash away at the “B” button on your 3DO controller, then you must bash away at the “B” button. Choose to argue and it will be game over. A hundred year ago it would have been called "Simon Says" in 1994 it was called an Interactive Anime movie - seemingly progress studied marketing but little else.

So, to summarise: No depth. No longevity. No ability to explore the game. Most people would consign Strahl to the celestial dustbin in the sky. A large black plastic bin put there by fans of Attic Attack and doing a quick trawl of the web you’ll find that most people have.

…but I’m not a fan of Attic Attack – I’m 3DO Kid.

So what’s to wonder about?

The big thing about Strahl is that it gets “Marks for effort.”- I know what you are thinking. That is like saying can we just be friends? “I like you, I really do, but can we just be friends.” It’s a brush-off. It’s a “Must do better” kind of comment.

…But Strahl is special. It’s not mediocre in the traditional sense. It is half utterly awful – and half down right jaw dropping amazing. The chasm between the two is pretty enormous. To the point where you have to wonder why has a game with such great graphics got such a lousy game and terrible plot bolted too it?

Some Japanese games have a knack for immersing you in a world where you get the feeling you should already know what is going on. Who the main character are and what they are doing – certainly that is the feeling I get from Strahl. Seeing it for the first time makes you pause, imagining that perhaps in Japan Strahl is a hit TV show with a string of Anime books and trading card game – except it hasn’t and it didn’t.

There seems to be no precursor and no successor but the animated representation of Alex, the main protagonist, seems well established, the art is broadcast quality and the sequences have been hand rendered by someone who knows exactly what they are doing. So-much-so that the graphics are the only reason to play the game - but it is a damned good reason.

Conversely the story line while certainly unique is best described as odd. An old man starving on the edge of a village is saved by the main character Alex. As it turns out, it isn’t an old man but the Creator – I’m assuming they mean god. To be fair I don’t know many games that feature god in this kind of way - simply a character. Sure, God mode or play as a god as in Populous – but not god himself as a character equivilent too Tales in Sonic games – with this element the story feels like a pre-biblical mythical tale or a Greek Classic tale – but it doesn’t take the concept much further than I have written here. God sees something in the young Alex and draws the conclusion that, should Alex pass seven trials, he could be suitable to become king. And that is as far as the plot goes.

Why? What? Eh? While you are scratching your head about this the opening level starts. Alex clinging to a ledge looking down a crevice with lava flowing beneath him. It’s fairly immediately engaging. The scene is well drawn and professionally animated. A prehistoric bird swoops into view, a giant rock creature emerges from the wall behind him and the anime-action style music plays in the background – without a doubt it is a beautifully crafted experience seeing it for the first time. A few joypad presses later and Alex is engaged in battle with a Titanic stone like enemy on his quest for the first crystal – or hidden light if you want to pedantic. Either way the battles are impressively delivered. As are all subsequent battles.

It also sounds like anime. If you have never seen an Anime movie this is going to be hard to describe but basically grunts made by Alex as he leaps and clambers about, the sound made when the sword is used or when say for example, glass breaks, is all classic anime.

Of cause while you are soaking in the opulent anime experience an arrow indicating you should have pushed up appears and because the movie keeps drawing you in, you will have forgotten you are playing a game and you will miss it.

Alex will plunge from the cliff. Get eaten. Die. Get chopped up. There are 48 ways for the young Mr Huckfield to scamper off this mortal plain. However, should you fail to complete Strahl on at least your second attempt you may wish to go to Accident and Emergency as either you are blinded and haven't noticed or someone, unbeknown to you, has cut your thumbs off.

The action sequences are spread over seven tasks. From forest and cave to labyrinth and flowery meadow.

At the end of each sequence Alex collects a crystal – interestingly in Japanese it says ‘hidden light’ rather than crystal but it amounts to the same thing visually. Having collected a crystal a new technology is bequeathed upon your village. Hot air balloons or improved windmills – Which is interesting but this part seems to serve no purpose, other than to suggest you will be a benevolent King – should Alex survive the quests of cause. However, there is no scoring mechanism, no rendered reward for your efforts, nothing.

The overall feeling I get is that Strahl is only half finished. Either it is rushed – or it had its budget pulled. Maybe it was a TV show and has simply been cut and paste into a game? There are other questions: Why is it called Strahl? It’s not a Japanese word. Strahl, in so far as I can make out, is a name. Why are the animated sequences so good but the rest of the game so awful?

What Strahl amounts to is a sequence of exceptionally good anime action sequences, glued to flimsy game and a mystifying story.

It also very rare – not quite as rare as the Mega-LD version but certainly heading that way!

3DO Kid.

One of the great questions of our gaming life will be, “If it wasn’t for Alone in the dark, would we have Resident Evil?”

I have to admit that I squeak, jump-about, yell and panic like a school-girl when it comes to audio-visual horror. On one side I have my all-male testosterone manliness edging me on to play gore filled sneak-abouts like Resident Evil 4 and Doom 3 and on the other a timid Nancy-girl who can barely look at the screen. Yes, it’s true, I over react – a lot. And yes, I took Doom 3 back and traded it in because I simply could not bear to play it. Too scary...

So - Alone in the dark is a seminal Survival horror game similiar in many ways to Resident Evil.

It is a criticism that the Japanese for the most part silently endure, is that of plagiarism. Any Japanese person to find themselves outside of their beloved country will no-doubt have been confronted with a foreigner welding the ugly finger of accusation. “Japan takes Western ideas and makes them smaller and cheaper.” In fairness of course the Japanese approach to business is simply a way of forcing the natural evolution of a product or idea. The difference being that Western companies very rarely look at something that they have created and say to themselves, “How can we make this better?”

...of cause that isn’t necessarily the case with Alone in the dark – as it was bloody good to start with but it does look suspiciously like the Japanese company Capcom took Interplays game and refined it for the better. Plagerising the whole concept of survival horror!

Alone in the Dark is all about atmosphere, the mood is set very early on and me being a snivelling coward the thunder-clap, right when the Interplay Armadillo first appears, set my nerves a-jangling.

You play as either the male Carnby, who was asked to visit a house called Derceto by a lady called Gloria Allen to investigate a piano in the loft. Is it me? Or would you too turn down a job to venture to a lonely old house in the woods, famous for witch craft and devil worship for a $150? Just to see a piano? Because I know I would.

Alternatively you can play the mildly easier version of the game with Emily who is visiting the Derceto house on the back of a suggestion by her uncle.

The location setting is exactly the same as Resident Evil – A grand old house in the woods occupied, naturally, by Zombies. What else?The characters and rooms graphically are less sophisticated than the Resident evil ones but more stylised. The building looks distinctly French with its carved patterns and colour combinations, compared to the Resident Evil mansion that looks more generic.

It is however too close to call, the haunted houses of the two seminal survival horror games are eerily similar. The biggest difference being the year in which the games are set. Resident Evil is set in the 1990s where as Alone in the dark is 1920s.

The action kicks off in the loft of this spooky old dwelling and immediately tries to build suspense using the music and a shock tactic. However, anyone familiar with Resident Evils joypad dropping shocks will see immediately where Alone in the dark is going wrong. The first enemy, that jumps through the window, which incidentally attacks for no apparent reason, looks like an over toothed mole with pupil-less green eyes and wings. Scary? Well yes perhaps in 1994 but it moves too slow. It only manages to be scary as you struggle to try and figure out how to kill it. Ultimately this thing lumbers through the room too slow to catch cold, let alone kill you. …but then it does as it turns out it is a super powerful over toothed mole with pupil-less green eyes and wings. Which is a trifle annoying.

Later the game does manage a few chair-jumpers where you’ll curse your girlish yelps and try hard to target the shotgun. Which, I promise you now, you will fail to do. The lunacy that is the ranged weapons and their for the most part unfathomable targeting system, will have you resorting back to the one area where AITD beats RE, namely hand-to-hand combat. It is much easier to execute and target a swift kick in the zombfied-bits of one of the walking dead than Resident Evil ever managed and makes it a more reliable form of self-defence than the Capcom games.

Other touches that RE never saw was you can interact with inconsequencial objects such as rocking horses, pianos, stools, etc.,

The game play is all but identical. Kick zombie in nuts, find objects stupidly located inside other objects and solve puzzles – although the puzzles tend to be a little more complex and the object finding borders on the down-right annoying. Missing the Resident Evil 'relevent object here twinkle'.

Clues are provided in the form of books, notepads and parchments. Most of these clues however only become obvious after you solved the problem and marred slightly by the corny voice acting reading them out.

Objects are stored in a menu system, these are best described as functional - however it is possible to leave objects lying around the house, allowing you to pick them up as an when you need them. Something Capcoms effort has only recently managed.

AITD is short. Someone new to the game could complete it in only a few hours and probably overall it is about a third of the size of the Capcom offering. During the final few objectives, the game begins to feel more like platformer as you hop around the marina area with an ability to jump, akin to early Tomb Raider. This jump ability however, only maifests itself once you are actually no longer in the main house.

This game presents some of the largest, biggest, blackest graphical borders of any game I have ever seen. It doesn't even try and hide the fact - borders so big you will need a passport.

While the graphics are dated, the cameras are usually well positioned and a genuine effort has been put on to their position to give a horror feel.

Horror feel has also been applied to the music, which does add to the game-play.

In essense the imagination and execution of the game is kept high throughout and Alone in the Dark could hardly be accused of being disappointing in any respect.

All in all AITD is a very competent game. The gameplay is balanced and while the graphics aren't the best the 3DO could do and the controls need tweaking, overall there is very little to fault AITD.

The major gripe is with the sloppy port. It's a 1991 PC game shoved on to a 1994 3DO multiplayer and the extra palette, extra grunt and extra power of the 3DO was no where near exploited. Which is a shame because bolstered here and there, Alone in the Dark 3DO edition could have had Resident Evil shivering in the toilets.

Of cause Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark were not the only survival horror games in Multiplayer Town. D by Warp is also a Survival horror of sorts and the 3DO also played host to a survival horror game known as Doctor Hauzer. In additional Killing Time had survival horror elements and all these predated Resident Evil.

So, yes, Resident Evil first appeared on the Playstation in 1996 and it seems to borrow extensively from the PC game made in 1991 and ported to 3DO in 1994: Alone in the Dark.

But no, you will be stunned to hear Survival Horror was not invented initially by Interplay and the Alone in the Dark series! – Apparently some Japanese developer called Capcom had made a game back in 1988 called "Sweet Home" touted as a Survival Horror RPG game for the Snes. A game which also bears, so I am told, a striking resemblance to Resident Evil. Tch! Damn Europeans… no imagination! It was a Japanese only release RPG but if you know where to look a fan translated version is kicking about.

Spooky rare too for the 3DO!

3DO Kid.

 

Starblade. It has no heritage and is something of a video game evolutionary dead-end, something of a dinosaur, a branch of the evolutionary gaming tree that was considered by the mainstream too rotten and ultimately cut-off.

My opinion on the game is quite different. I guess it wouldn’t be much fun if it wasn’t. I personally consider it is one of the pinnacles of arcade gaming. It should, in my opinion, be considered one of the crowning moments of gaming. Or perhaps one of the very epitomes of shallow arcade gaming thrills. A game almost entirely designed for grabbing money and wowing graphic whores and of cause thrilling cheap ride arcade gluttons like me.

However, what was good in the arcade is rarely good in the home and Starblade represents perhaps the turning point for this realisation. The point where people began to ask – "...do we really want arcade games in the home?" And ultimately, "...do we really want arcade games?" Of cause history shows that the answer to both questions was “No”. 

“A few neat touches…”, “…style over content…”, “…shallow experience…” Nay sayers and the people I hold responsible for killing the arcades, may even pooh-pooh Starblade by judicially saying its genus may shows an ancestry dating back to Spacewar and Space Invaders since after-all it is a shoot’em up but somewhere along the line it was infected with the on-rails bacterium and the poisoned bloodline of Laserdisc. Not to mention being almost ‘Star Wars’ and featuring single figure playing time.

…but I don’t care what they say.

Laserdisc, once considered playmate of the year for people with a desire to re-introduce the ice-cream break half-way-through a movie, is these days a sure-fire way to put a sneer on most peoples faces. However, mention it in association with video gaming and that sneer contorts into a child disturbing grimace. Further more it floods anyone over the age of thirty with memories of Mad Dog Mcree, Space Ace and Mach 3. (What?) Put simply, Laserdisc gaming is to retro gaming what the Austin Princess is to classic cars – simply not cool and unlikely ever to be.

Starblade is also, to add insult to Laserdisc injury, an ‘on-rails’ shooter. Yikes! OK, I’m mad. On-rail shooter!? Definitely not good! You must be thinking to yourself, surely in this age of modern gaming no-one likes on-rails shooters? It’s inhuman – right? Images of Microcosm also on the 3DO and that early 90’s arcade Bohemouth, Galaxian3 come flooding back. Perhaps even memories of Starfox or Rebel Assault? Again – mention ‘on-rail gaming’ and most people immediately think they are William Wallace – “FREEDOM!”

The icing on this cake of gaming sure-fire disaster, I’m saving the cherry for next, is that a lot of the in-game content seems to take its cues from the Atari classic wire-frame Star Wars. Waves of enemy fighters, a dive on to a planet surface with rising towers complete with gun turrets on top, Death Star style killer mechanized planets, a mission to shoot the core and then a dramatic escape from the exploding super structure – OK, perhaps more than just cues. Well, Star Wars itself is hardly original, taking its ideas from as far a field as ancient texts, to Japanese movies, to new-age (1970’s style) thought, so I like to think of Starblade as a sort of tribute …

To the cherry then. If being an on-rails Laserdisc Star Wars clone wasn’t enough, each game of Starblade from start to finish lasts no more than 10 minutes. To anyone who has bothered to read this far, this all must seem freakish. I guess it must be easy to draw parallels with those bazaar women who marry prisoners with life-sentences and me liking this game. You must be thinking that nobody today, surely, can still be enjoying games like Starblade?

So, at which point I’m guessing pretty much like right now, people throw the psychological switch marked “off”.

To crystallise the point: Starblade is the bastard child of Princess Daphne of Dragons Lair and an impotent Peppy O’hare of Starfox, with, perhaps, a George Lucas look-a-like holding a Polaroid camera over them. Their grubby short-lived bestiality taking place down a dark alley somewhere near Namcos’ 1990 development studios. The product of their shame giving life to this Neanderthal of a game.

…still there?

I love Starblade though – I really do and it is not through pity. I know a lot of people have just had a fit – I hope you’ve taken your sedatives. You’re calm. You can see past the rails. Past the laserdisc mantel.

Yet even with rose-tint-o-vision (patent pending) Starblade could hardly be compared to a night of sensual embracement with a “The Sun page 3 stunner”. It’s not that deep.

…in my opinion it’s more akin to a nice smile from Miss World.

You see like that smile, Starblade offers a pleasant glimpse into a fantasy world that may have been. And for those ten minutes of game-play you feel happy. Warm. Content in a universe that promises depth you cannot see or gain access too. Fighting a virtual war you have no real knowledge of. Starblade is not Privateer, Elite or even Wing Commander. All this doesn’t mean it’s not a classic game however.

My overall opinion is that Starblade is an insight into someone elses' fantasy. A fantasy of deep space battles. I like to consider it a voyage through another mans vision. It is clearly a labour of love. It is after-all not a cheaply thrown together game with grainy visuals, weak soundtrack and a standard arcade box. Blood, sweat and tears clearly went into Starblade and if you know where to look, you can still see it.

But why make such a shallow game? The answer maybe this - gaming, for me at least, is not about trends, or platforms or developers or time, or even brands. It’s about experience. Like a good book, film or music score it’s where the game takes you emotionally. The question should always be ‘Is it fun?’ A game can have all the freedom, all the scope, all the Artificial Intelligence and all the ‘cool stuff’ but if it’s not fun, then it is not a game.

For me and perhaps the developers Starblade is equivalent to the chase scene in the original Italian Job or the famous introduction to Beethoven’s symphony #5. It is the bit people remember.

Ultimately, in my opinion, gaming can either be a story telling, a test of skill or an experience. Starblade is clearly in the “experience” category. However, when playing Starblade you can’t help but feel that somewhere there is more depth to the story, it is almost as if you have stumbled across some epic story of planetary survival just at the critical moment. Or if it was a movie ‘the good bit’.

 

Let us focus on the “experience” of Starblade, so it perhaps helps if you imagine being back in 1993, stood in front of the arcade custom cabinet and you are looking at a poor plastic mock-up of a spaceship console.

The first thing: You’ll deny it in public but the excitement of being in a fake space battle, in that fake ship, put into that ‘arcade life-or-death fake scenario™’ invokes some primeval emotion. It is after all politically correct to kill aliens. Guilt free murder – such as it is. Ultimately Starblade is a promise. The attract mode promises something you have fantasised about.

 
Since seeing Star Wars the movie you have been promising yourself this: To take part in a genuine space battle. Your heart beat goes up, your eyes start to race around the massive screen, your fingers tingling with anticipation. You give the yoke a waggle – just to get the feel. It is exciting. It really is. You are going to play to win because the experience so far has hit all right buttons. It’s all embarrassing but true. The game has sold you. Only the truly cynical are sat there in front of the screen thinking of freedom, exploration and rails. Most people just want to see what happens.

The introduction has you leaving a beautifully rendered mother ship, reminiscent of a Viper exiting the Galactica. As you exit the tunnel, the depth of the universe expands before you. You can see your home world ‘Mother Planet’ and a number of Battle Cruisers burning away. You cannot tell whether they are friends or foe.

Suddenly, the action starts. It’s frantic. Swarms of alien ships attack. These should be familiar to anyone who has played the sister game – Galaxian3. The blue atmosphere of Mother Planet and the motion blurred stars add incredible depth to what you seeing. You ‘Woo!’ and duck and dive in your chair as the game confuses your brain. The original Namco System 21 graphics, eventually ported to the 3DO and Playstation, swings the rendered images left and right, rolling you over enormous battleships, dodging missiles and avoiding asteroids.

Like a cannoneer in an old time warship you pound away at the enemy battle cruisers as they majestically sweep across the screen and as dozens of enemy fighters swarm your field of view you take aim to reduce them to a short lived ball of flames.

You battle through the fighters and then you are sent through an asteroid belt, laced with ‘Battle Asteroids’, to emerge to face a huge wire-frame space station complex.
 

 
Eventually your ship plunges onto the planet surface, the same way it always has, for every player that has ever played Starblade. Finally, you’ll blast away at the central target, “Heart of the Octopus” in the cavernous core, and, just like in Star Wars, it will be destroyed. Then the on-rails engine will auto-pilot you out of the wreckage.

Ten minutes and you have won. Mission completed. You could almost not fail too. It is not the hardest game. But you won! Your heart beat returns to normal. Your eyes adjust to the light outside the game. You feel euphoric. 

 

The game has also won. It got your money. It played the player and it played well. Ultimately you won’t have forgotten your Starblade experience. It was fun. There can be no denying. For ten minutes this deep space epic over shadowed the freedom of Elite and the story line of Wing Commander. For a moment the awesome spectacle that is Starblade dwarfed its nearest rivals absolutely. With its scale, its sense of reality, its wonderment, its incredible power and its tribute to the technology of its time. For a moment Starblade showed you exactly what you wanted. What you hoped. What you dreamt games like Privateer would be like but never were.

In the arcades this experience is priceless. If 50p is priceless. But for some reason you remove the cabinet, the yoke, the smell of cigarettes and the Starblade experience dwindles in the light of the red and green LED’s of your 3DO Multiplayer – Trips dream machine exceeded the Namco uber unit technologically but lost something intangible spiritually. It is simply not as fun in the home. Could the spirit of arcade gaming be contained in a 50p coin?

Not all the rare for the 3DO either. This was a 3DO Kid Megablog! 3DO Kid.

 

Many people claim that the 3DO version of Starblade is arcade perfect. Well, as it turns out it is and it isn’t.

On the whole the game graphics are identical. The 3DO version even boasts a textured version but there are other differences. Firstly the introduction. The Arcade original is crystal clear and readable – unlike the 3DO version, and presents, albeit with spelling errors, a clear explanation of the battle that is about to take place.

From the threat to Mother World in 35 hours from Red Eye, the mechanised planet, through to Red Eyes nuclear power reactor “Octopus”, the entrance to the “Octopus” named “Mouth of the Octopus” and the final objective a power stone named “Heart of the Octopus”. All of which the on rails action will sweep you past so you can blast the hell out of it.

On even closer examination however, the introduction screens are very different. Although unreadable in the 3DO implementation, the ‘blurred wording’ is a different shape and length to the arcade version. Why change it? The other difference is the explosions. The 3DO explosions are not as big as the arcade ones and seem to be from the 3DOs standard library of explosions rather than the arcade ones.

The introduction information (below) is taken from the Japanese version of Starblade and thanks to MAME. Spelling errors have been maintained. Noticeably the word “Octopus” and “Vector”.

Mechanized planet = red eye
Mother planet = our living planet.
Mechanized planet is approaching Mother Planet with 35 hours.

Red eye Category:

Foe attack device Class Q.
    Hardware spec:
           Diameter: 780Km Cruising speed: 18.74km/sec
    Structural analysis:
           Fe: 28.9%
           Si: 19.1%
            C: 12.7%
           Al: 11.4%
           Bi: 7.3%
           Ti: 4.0%
 Unknown: 16.6%

Notice: Defence level A High energy defensive barrier. Limited access passages.

Power reactor: Octpus attack vecters.
         Position: E 135.43’ , N 43.12’

Federation FEDCON database. FEDCON File No. VPD-10963-Q1

Power reactor “Octopus” Category:
Foe planet attack device Class Q
Foe position: E 135.43’ , N 43.12’
Foe hardware spec:
          Diameter Max 3200m Min. 1200m
          Height 1170m
          Maximum output: 45200tw (Terra Watts)
          Power Source: Nuclear fusion magnetron. Notice:
          Defense level A.

Foe control in center of mechanixed planet Access denied by foe defenses.

There is an access passage “The mouth of the Octopus” This is the access to the interior of Octopus The entrance is defended with reinforced portal.

Position: X: 1600m Y: 720m
Size of entarnce :
Height: 64m Width: 74m

Federation FEDCON database. FEDCON File No. VPD-10963-Q2.

In the centre of the Octopus is a “Power Chamber” This chamber has a Power, has a Power Stone, the heart of Octopus. All Red Eye energy converges here. This is the only weak point of Red Eye.

Position. X: 1600m Y: 590m

Good luck Geosword.

Let us not trouble ourselves with concerns of Crime Patrol 1, I'm reasonably confident I will get to it eventually.

How do you know when you are getting old? When you can hold an adult conversation with someone who doesn't remember Miami Vice, the original series, being on Television... That for me has been a big pointer.

In '87 I loved Miami Vice. The cars, the action, the jiggly boobies in the introduction. Of cause it eventually became uncool - sneers and laughter and nudges would ensue if you were to mention it. Not in 2006 however - Michael Mann (God bless him) is making Miami Vice cool once again and by association - so am I!

Why am I wittering on about this? Crime Patrol 2 is the A-Team meets Miami Vice.

It's traditional mid-eighties drugs knee-jerk of a game. I'm either way too cool or way too much of a geek for drugs but it's something I've never really encountered but even to a prude like me, shooting Marijuana dealers seems, I don't know, extreme?

Still that's what Crime Patrol 2 has you doing. In a light gun capacity only of cause.

This being an American Laser games game it is a conversion from the arcade original, even finding it's way onto the Microsoft Xbox as well as obviously the 3DO.

The scenes are set in Sierra County, Chicago, the American / South American Border, and then into South America are all well delivered.

The sets are real world, the women pretty (and scantly dressed) and the explosions are Hollywood huge and naturally involve expensive looking boats. The acting is terrible but all part of the love and the cliches are Texas sized. Gun crazy cops and drugs dealers called 'Lopez'.

If you didn't like Mad Dog 1 and 2, Space Pirates, Who shot Johnny Rock and 99% of all American Laser Game games, then you'll hate this, alternatively ... well, obviously, you will love it. That's what alternatively means.

Very rare too.

3DO Kid.

6,000,000,000 people world wide. 50,000,000 are English. Represented as a fraction I'm already a 1/300 of the human population. Of those 50 million lets assume only 50,000 bought 3DO multiplayers. (Perhaps generous but I'm keeping the numbers easy.)

Of which no more than 4 had every copy of every game for the 3DO. Of which I am the only one stupid or egotistical enough to run a website on the topic. Which means I was in a minority to begin with. I then joined increasingly smaller minorities until, well, it was just me. I represent 1/6,000,000,000 of the human population - Unique? Or freak? Tough call, even for me.

Add-ons. When do you think the executives at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will get it through their thick skulls no one buys add-ons? Not disks, not drives, not memory, not rumble packs, not expansion graphic accelerators, not nothing. They all seem unable to learn from the past. History to these people is something that never ever repeats itself and is therefore probably best to ignore it.

...of cause history itself is littered with corpses muttering something to contrary - If you notice there is my opinion something of the 3DO about the 360 - but no one listens and we will have to wait and see.

Because of the cheapness and when I say cheap, we are talking pocket-money cheap, with regards the 3DO development kit, it seems to me at least that the 3DO fostered several different types of developer. The good, the bad and the ugly.

Of the ugly we have the riff-raff like Mirage - makers of Rise of the Robots or Core - makers of BC Racer and of cause the lamentable writer of Cyberdillo.

Of the bad we had habitual porters. American Laser games, Interplay and an entire Udon shop crammed with half-arsed Japanese developers.

Of the good we were blessed with Crystal Dynamics, Microcabin, 3DO studio and of cause - Electronic Arts.

If it had not been for these developers I would have ended it all by now, by hot wiring an American Laser games gun to a car battery and then ricocheting bolts of 3DO generated hard-light at my welcoming brain.

...where was I? Oh yes - add-ons'.

Shockwave opertion Jumpgate is an add-on for the original, inspired or inspirer of ID4 - Shockwave.

It's exactly the same as Shockwave except it has you taking the fight to the aliens, and spread across 5 missions you scamper across the universe in an attempt to purge them from existence.

It won't run without detecting a save game from the original Shockwave and it was, as I recall, a tiny bit cheaper.

If you liked Shockwave, as I did, then this is for you. If you didn't well, err, don't buy it.

It's the usual EA polish with high quality renders, excellent 3D graphics and a moderately fun and balanced shooter.

And because it is an add-on, it is quite rare too.

3DO Kid.

The video game playing world is rife with prejudices. No? Disagree? Let me run some typical knee jerkers past you, so you get a feel for what I'm talking about.

What about on-rails shooters? All rubbish, right? No freedom - right? Interactive movie. They are all dreadful - yes? US Gold. Synonymous with cheap, cynical cash-ins? Of cause. Game movie tie-ins - doesn't really need a comment. You're getting my point by now I'm sure.

We as gamers pass judgement before having played a game. I don't like sports sims. I don't like FPS'. I don't like 2D shooters. This was very much my opinion of games until recently.

Most likely these prejudices come about from having one bad experience of a particular genre or developer. 

However, one thing I've learnt playing the games of the 3DO multiplayer is that much like people, it is unfair to tar all games of a particular type with the same brush, unless you have in fact played them all.

...and we, or rather I, am rapidly approaching the point where I have actually played every game on the 3DO platform. Which must place me in an infinitesimally small percentage of the human race. Less than 0.00001%? What do you think?

Todays game is rarer than a frog dressed up as a member of the G-Force team  and harder than trying to wrestle a rastafarian away from a Dutch all you can smoke buffet.

It is of cause Olympic Summer Games Atlanta 1996 by US Gold. A combination of developer and genre that would trouble all but the strongest of hearts.

...despite the fact it is pretty damned good.

Good is not a word I use lightly and rarely in general but OSGA '96 has good everything.

Good introduction. Good graphics. Good selection of options and good game-play.

The games to play are as follows: Track events are the 100m, 400m. Field events are Javelin, Discus, Hammer, with Jumping events of long, high, pole, triple and also available is Fencing, Swimming, and Weightlifting. Not forgetting Rapid fire, Skeet and Archery.

All presented in stunning 3D. Well stunning for 1996. Actually it wasn't. By 1996 we had seen quite a lot better from a number of different platforms but for the 3DO multiplayer they aren't bad.

The tracks, fields, swimming pools etc., are well represented in their 3D glory. Complete with 3D adjudicators and opponents. Even if that means 10 or so fully 3D opponents. The frame rate is healthy and nothing about the presentation detracts you from the button mashing that running and swimming sports simulators usually entail. Suffice to say that the 3DO controller couldn't even manage to upset this game.

Each event, regardless of what it might be, is really easy to lose I initially found. I astounded myself time-and-time again with my ability not to win. Those silly Americans and Chinese racking up the gold medals when obviously the objective is to come last. Try to remember I'm British. If however you feel the urge to play the Olympics like Johnny come-lately foreigner and actually try and come first, then the learning curve is somewhat trickier.

However, not impossible.

With a little bit of effort I was a dab-hand at skeeting and the 100m and I was getting to grips with high jump admirably. I still wasn't gold, silver or bronze but I was not last either and the game was rewarding me sufficiently to make me want to try again. I could smell victory, although I couldn't actually see it.

Each sport is reasonably detailed and the game displays a true understanding by the developer of the challenges faced by the real life athletes.

For a sports sim, of the Olympics, developed by the now defunct US Gold this is actually pretty good. Not once do you feel that you are playing a series of mini-games. The design effort, overall polish and  presentation do give you the feeling that you are participating in a Real(tm) 3DO Olympics and to be fair it is 'good'. Very good.

It's also a nice show case for what the 3DO was capable of.

Excruciatingly rare. Trust me on that.

3DO Kid.

I have been to Japan a few times. One of things that always strikes me when visiting a Japanese video game shop is the overall superiority of the game box art. Sound stupid? Sure it does. A classic example however is actually the 3do game Escape from Monster Manor - I recommend you do a Google search and have a look. The Japanese house in shadow with the red sky is really, well, haunting. While the US/Euro style green is, to be honest, dull. That's not the only example either.

However, the Japanese must have been gutted to see the box art to Samurai Showdown for the 3DO. It is, to resusitate an old English school phrase, ' ... a bit naff'.

The game conversion from the SNK original to the 3DO was done by the American company Crystal Dynamics. Once mighty friends of the 3DO, second only to Electronic Arts. The conversion is very good.

Samurai Shodown often finds itself compared to Street Fighter II, although to be fair only your mother would draw the comparison. "Ooh look - fighting cartoon characters. Where's Daffy? I do like Daffy. 'e makes me laugh. Go on - put Daffy on." ...etc.

No - the truth is Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown are like chalk and cheddar.

Set in the Japan during 1800's, Samurai Shodown contains weapons and focuses on powerful hits rather than combination hits. The overall emphasis is more on timing, again in my opinion, than Street Fighter, and the game is much less reliant on jumping about. Street Fighter always did seem to have a lot of jumping about.

The characters in Shodown are also more stylised. The creepy Gen-an, the massive Earthquake, the dyed in the wool Samurai Haohmaru and so on. They are all cliches' - sure - of cause they are but there is nothing wrong with cliched characters in my opinion, as long as it done well. And they are. Certainly more cliched than in Street Fighter II. Difficult as that maybe for some to imagine.

The other major difference is blood. Second only to the transfusionists nightmare, the infamous Mortal Kombat, Samurai contains more than its fair share of claret. Which was nice for the 3DO however. Many other versions of Samurai Showdown that appeared on things like Sega Mega Drive had the blood and in the case of the Sega machine, one character removed - thanks to censorship and Mortal Kombat related hysteria. The inclusion of blood in the 3do version was all part of that drive to target the 3DO machine to a more mature gamer - or at least that is how the rhetoric went.

Graphically Samurai has the edge on both its 3DO counterparts, namely Sailormoon and Street Fighter. The backgrounds are richer, with more animation and the characters seem more colourful, although to be fair it is obviously not a scratch on its original NeoGeo home.

The screen also jumps and scales and moves about trying to keep the two opposing players in shot. Much the same as in Sailormoon.

All-in-all, to be fair, I don't really like Samurai Shodown. It maybe in part due to my love of Street Fighter but I find it less tactical and less skillful than Street Fighter II. Hitting your opponent is less of a considered manoeuvre and more an action of pure luck.

The characters are also Japanese with a capital 'J'. As are the settings. As is the untranslated spoken language. And the characters lack in my opinion the universal appeal of those found in Street Fighter. The 'hero', Haohmaru is much much harder to empathise with than Ryu or Ken, and the women characters less attractive, and the bad characters too creepy. It all adds up to a total feeling of discomfort. Samurai Showdown simply not being comfortable to play, for me at least.

That's not to say it's a bad game - it's probably an acquired taste, after all it is quick and seems well tuned to accommodate the less than fighter-friendly 3DO joypad. Although the word 'joy' is not something to be associated with the 3DO joypad lightly. It's also popular. Today we are looking at the fifth incarnation of Samurai Shodown and still going strong.

What it boils down to is that it is not Street Fighter II. In fact it seems to be trying hard not to be Street Fighter II. I might go as far to say that should Street Fighter say it liked 'day' - Samurai Shodown would immediately say it prefers 'night' for no other reason than to be different. Perhaps therein lies the problem for me at least. I like SF2 and those that don't probably prefer Samurai Shodown.

About as rare as Street Fighter II. Go on ask your mum!

3DO Kid.

Sailormoon. Sailormars. Sailorchibimoon. Sailormercury. And yes, praise be to the god of childishness, Sailoruranus.

Ahh!

Some times when I put a disk into my 3DO, I know pretty much immediately whether its going to be up-to scratch or not. And don't start to whitter on about judging books by covers, if you think that, you should be watching Richard and Judy on ITV and leaving me alone.

Instinct. I've got my 3DO eye-in. I can spot a good or bad 3DO game at 1,000 yards.

...and this is good. Very very good actually.

Pretty Soldier - Sailormoon S, to give it its full title, is a Japanese only 2D fighting game by Bandai.
 
The introduction has a combination of Anime Sailormoon characters and 3D rendered Sailormoon characters, supported by some J-Pop. (Japanese Pop music) A guilty pleasure of mine is listening to some ultra tacky J-Pop. It's happy beats and it's crooning female singers - singing god only knows (and the Japanese) what they are saying but it always sounds cheerful and happy to me, and I like it. That's the only reason I'm mentioning it.

The presentation overall is good and there is an excellent sense of quality. Nice touches like a library mode which features a biopsy of the characters and the opportunity to play the game music.

The in game graphics starting with character animation is pretty good too. The characters are well defined, move well, with plenty of frames of animation and thanks to the power of Google, I can confirm they look just like the girls in the TV series.

The in game backdrops to the fight are well implemented and like SF2 and SS they are animated and depending on how close the two characters fighting are the screen zooms and stretches in an attempt to give you the best view. There also seems to be a wide screen option.

With 9 Sailor girls to choose from, each with their own special moves there is plenty to enjoy.

The fighting is balanced, and from the characters I played and fought against, none of them seemed to have an adverse advantage. Although Sailorjupiters' electric-charged attacks wore me down a little. The computer controlled opponents can seem a little vengeful if they start to lose but nothing that can't be over come, and the game will have you eventually punching the air and mouthing the word 'Yes!' in no-time at all.

The characters moves are the usual punch and kick. The shoulder buttons varying the strength, speed and in some cases also the reach.

Most moves can be countered. For example fireballs take time to be generated and if you're close enough you can hit the opponent before they have time to let one off. The same goes for other moves too. Such as jumping, spinning kicks, etc. Although the game doesn't recognise this and there is no reward for countering moves. No reward other than you don't get hit.

There is a power-bar that automatically fills up and once full offers the opportunity for a super-powerful attack.

Many of the special moves have something of the Street Fighter II about them. Rolling your thumb around the 3DO controller certainly has a familiar feel and a familiar onscreen response. The main character, Sailormoon, has a fireball attack that is identical in execution to Ryu's in Street Fighter for example. It's not a bad thing - especially when the instructions are in Japanese.

Talking of the controller. Before I started this game up I plugged in the Capcom controller from Street Fighter II but it had to come out. The biggest shock of this game is that it plays better using the standard 3DO controller. Those of you familiar with the standard 3DO controller may want to sit down, have a rest and perhaps a nice cup of tea.

Finally - some nice touches are unlimited continues, the icon of your character next to your power bars changes depending on how you are doing and some of the spoken Japanese is so simple even I can understand it. ITAI! (Ouch!) Gunballemas (Good luck!) and so on.

Overall this is actually very good. It plays well and is fun. Admittedly it is a bit old school but for 1995 what do you expect?

It proves that games like Shadow war is succession and  Way of the warrior had no excuse - fighting games are about timing, balance and reward both visually and audiably. Sailmoon hits all these buttons square on. (Even using the 3DO Dpad!)

The only minor point is character engagement. And perhaps it is because I have never seen the show and perhaps because all the characters are female, I did feel a little ambivalent towards my avatar. The game-play does make up for this however.

All-in-all Sailormoon can hold her own against Capcoms Ryu and Ken, and SNKs Haohmaru and Wan-Fu as one of the best games on the 3DO platform.

Quite hard to get hold of too in 3DO rarity stakes!

3DO Kid.

Games - are all different.

Some games snuggle up to you, all cute and soft and then once you know them, they punish you like you're a bad boy. Whips and chains... but you like it.

Others are gentle and kind and even when you're naughty, wouldn't raise a hand to you.

Johnny Bazookatone is like grabbing a handful of stinging nettles and shoving them down your pants.

It would never be a goo