It was so big and shiny. I just had to pop it in and let it spin around. When it came up it was so big and impressive to begin with. And it was so hard too! I kept playing with it and playing with it and it just got harder and harder. Until I had to eject it.
...I am of cause talking about N.O.B.
Enough then with the innuendo? Yes? O.K.
N.O.B – Neo Organic Bioform a game by Sanyo for the 3DO multiplayer.
Having played this game for a couple of hours I can’t pigeon-hole its genre. It is without any fear of contradiction a unique game. It is a first person maze, turn based, futuristic 2D fighting game? Perhaps…
The story line is even vaguer. You have been kidnapped by an unknown crime syndicate and turned into a Bio-weapon. Your mission is to escape from the laboratory and get the medicine to turn yourself back to human.
The game appears to be comprised of two stages - in so far as I have deduced.
The first part is straight forward enough – roaming around a 3D maze. Similar to every FPS ever made. This part has its strengths and it weaknesses.
On the strengths side it melts pre-rendered graphics to real-time generated graphics extraordinarily well. Entering a lift or a special room and this transition is done brilliantly. The game also features a very good onscreen map. Which is helpful.
Helpful because turning left or right can be disorientating and is really bad. Yes, you heard me right, turning to the side is done very poorly – you as the player never seem close enough to the wall to actually perform a turn but then once you do turn – by some miracle of poor 3D engine design, you were close enough after-all.
It’s confusing and disorientating and makes you feel like you have rotated 180 degrees as opposed to 90. To over-come this fairly major short-coming, you compensate by watching the onscreen map rather than the game itself. So the 3D maze roaming part isn't exactly great.
The second part of the game is fighting. I’ll be upfront about this, it’s more like a bitch slapping contest actually.
Your character is one of seven photo-realistic bioform monsters. These monsters are realised graphically very impressively – anyone familiar with monster from the Japanese Godzilla or Ultraman will recognise the Bio-organic life forms in the N.O.B. I guess parallels to the animated Genocyber series and the bio-boosting Gyver are in order too. Sure. OK. They are men and women in highly convoluted suits - bobbing, swaying and half-dancing like drunks at an all night Karaoke bar but the suits are pretty good and a nice number of frames of animation have been utilised in the game, so they do look and animate nicely.
To fight you have to attack – such as it is in N.O.B. This is broken into two parts. Firstly a cross hair part where you must pinpoint a part of your body you want to use in the attack. At the same time your opponent is doing likewise. Then, after the limb has been selected, some random process takes place and the screen flips to a traditional 2D fighter pose. Your N.O.B., versus another N.O.B., so to speak. At this point just one of you slaps the other in a wimpy not really making contact bloodless way and then it's back to part selecting.
Of cause, receive too many slaps to your N.O.B. and it’s game-over.
It is very unclear as to why just one hit takes place. It’s also unclear as to why one slapping N.O.B beats another.
Confusion also reigns over another element. One where you are applying extra HP to one part of your body. Perhaps, and I'm unsure, you improving their hit ability. Defeat an enemy however and this number increases. Why this is all happening is vague at best. Made worse by the fact the game, except spoken parts, is predominately in English.
There are also three difficulty levels to choose from. However, the first two appear to be miss-spelt, as in my opinion it should have read. ‘Hard’, ‘Hard’ and ‘Hard’.
All this is of cause fine. Obscure game. Mysterious menu options. Cack-handed game-play. Impossible difficulty. All of these features are of cause no stranger to 3DO Kid. The real bane. The real suffering. The real rabbit dropping in this packet of Revels is the load times.
Never – in the history of the world – has anything loaded so slowly. Enter maze. Cue 30 seconds of loading. Enter lift. More loading. Meet monster. Loading. Start fight. Even more loading. Switch to 2D view of this slap-fest. Yes, you guessed right, more loading.
Somewhere in deepest, darkest Japan there is some guy still playing with his copy of N.O.B. Still waiting for it to finish loading, still waiting for the instructions to make sense and still wandering the nicely textured but ultimately dull labyrinth of mazes and levels.
Sadly I don’t want to meet him. Anyone playing with their copy of N.O.B for that long will be blind and perhaps have hairy palms.
…and it is rare too!
3DO Kid.
If you think 30 seconds is a long load time try playing some of the early ps2 titles. Simpson road rage has a 2 minute load screen after every level. The only psx game that i remember not having terrible load times was metal gear solid. perhaps the load times were just hidden behind the codec dialog scenes.. in any case developers need to be more creative with their load times...remember on ridge racer you could play galaga and by the time it was done loading you didnt want to start the real game?