3DO Interactive Multiplayer

"...to god who makes the impossible possible."

Which is the weird dedication given to this game in the credits. Weird because it's game about demons from what I can see.

And clearly God isn't helping good-old 3DO Kid, because if he was, he would have made the impossible task of understanding this game possible. Which he didn't.

It's an RPG. Kinda. If Immercenary is an RPG, so is this. It's difficult to describe this game. Imagine wandering around Salvidor Dahlis pictures, bumping into pre-rendered demons, battling them, then posessing their bodies.

Yes. Hmmm. That's what I thought.

I did fight a giant crab once, but the scene was not amazing.

When I say it's like Immercenary it's probably more like Dragons Lore. Everything is pre-rendered, and your movement is merely back, forwards, left and right. You move in and out of pre-rendered scenes basically, it's not a proper 3D world like Immercenary.

It's made by Sala Internation who also produced Grand Chef and published by Sanyo.

Rare outside of Japan and an English version doesn't exist.

3DO Kid

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Grrr! What!? No? Man? No. I hate this. I do. I hate it. You know what's like? It's like winning the lottery to discover two-hundred thousand other people won it too. It's like waiting for your favourite meal all day. You book the restaurant, you sit there with anticipation, the waiter takes your order, your mouth slobbering all over the place, the meal arrives and what? There is a big old house-fly, dead and resting in the middle of the plate.

Bugs!

Decathlon was released last year by Older Games, who sadly are no longer with us, but they are dumping all their stuff on eBay right now, so if you are quick - who knows?

Decathlon looks great. It was made by 3DO Studio in their prime, which was around 1995/6 but because Decathlon is a pre-release beta it has more than just one big fat dead house-fly sat in it.

It crashes. It crashes a lot. You've been warned.

The other annoyance is that there are no instructions. Trying to figure out what a buggy game is expecting in the way of input during a virtual shot-put tournament can easily shred ones nerves.

Other things like the contestants names are beta so it's Rex and Neil from Japan and Jim from Italy.

You have to be a thick skinned 3DO fan to enjoy because of all the bugs, but if you do stick with it there are a few things that stand out.

The graphics are amazing. The 3D stadium isn't anything to write home about but the character animations are extremely good, characters arms and legs are shaded to give the impression of depth and they do look really very good indeed while doing the events, which are:

100M, 110M hurdles, Long Jump, High Jump, 400M sprint, Discus, Shot Put, Javelin, 1500M Run and Pole Vault.

It's all obviously been motion captured, and watching the athletes run, kick the dirt or throw a javelin, or jump about in jubilation is very impressive. Each athlete has a shadow and the camera zooms in and out very smoothly. Squint during one of the running races with upto eight other contestants on the screen and you can almost see a real race. That's not bad for the old 3DO.

The sounds rich, the samples aren't terribly refined but the tunes are high quality.

Eight players could have played together, but I imagine due to the preponderance of bugs it would be somewhat irritating, which again is a great shame.

There are only 50 copies in existence due to licensing restrictions, and since Older Games has gone game-over it's not going to re-emerge any-day soon.

3DO Kid.

Another easy on the tongue game title. Not. Don't despair, I'm doing Decathlon next, you might be able to massage out the pain with that.

One thing I do know about Japan is that their TV shows are just as rubbish as ours, and probably yours.

There are three types of celebrity on TV around the world I'm sure you will agree. The super-famous like Tom Cruise and Brad Pit, the regional famous like Bob Monkhouse and Jonathon Ross and then...

Well, after that there is daytime TV nobodies who clutter up the airwaves jabbering like electrocuted monkeys on speed. Each and every country has them. Make the mistake of tuning into RAI-UNO (Italian TV) like I have in many-a-hotel, and you will receive a short sharp jab of the kind of TV that can cause permanent mental scaring. Fat ugly women, old men and poisonous children, with a smattering of animals there to make the rest of us wonder how our species escaped the primeval caves unaided. Proof positive, if anymore were needed, that evolution is a bell-curve and we are on the way back down.

And lo, the Japanese have their fair share of daytime celebrities like the rest of us. This game is one such digitized version of a uber-minor celebrity splattered gameshow. It appears a bit more realistic than Twisted but shares the same high production values.

I guess in a room full of rational Japanese speaking people, with four 3do controllers and a TV, this could be a lot more fun. Sadly, for the rest of us, it's about as much fun as watching a group of loud jabbering clinically white toothed and suited Japanese, dressing up like school girls and then screaming, clapping and running about a lot, with only the occasional opportunity to press the 'A' button rearing its demented head about every 3 minutes to break the maniacal monotony.

It appears about as often as Twisted - so go figure.

3DO Kid.

Okay. If you, like me, have reached a certain age, you will have realised by now that the world, and the people in it, are pretty weird. Some are grumpy, some are irritating, some are nerds, some are perverts, some pedants and so-on.

It's true.

Now, no-one is perfect, me least of all, and we all can be accused of most of things above, the trick is not to dive to far into one particular trait.

Which brings me on nicely to All Tokimeki Mahjong Paradise Special Videos.

I don't know, maybe it's just me, maybe I alone don't find naked animated girls all that interesting but you know what? I don't think I am.

I am aware of a small hardcore of nutters who have made brave attempts to bring their bizaar pervsion out of the dark into the light.

The biggest push this perversion had was when the "Do you prefer Wilma or Betty from the Flintstones?" question did the rounds.

"Neither."

Is the correct answer. Since, after all, they are animated characters. Not real women. It's all to weird for me.

Then there was the Lara Croft shinanigans. A very popular British games magazine on April the 1st one year, decided to spread the myth that the game Tomb Raider for the Playstation featured a nude Lara cheat. It didn't, but that didn't stop hoards of weirdos pestering the known world for details of the game cheat.

Anyway, there also seems to be a huge market for this stuff, so it seems, in Japan. The 3DO has more than it's fair share of animated nudity. Most of it hinges on or around either stats games or Mahjong. Like todays title.

Mahjong isn't easy. Especially when you only really understand about 60% of what the hell is going on.

Great screen fulls of Kanji expode on the screen, your opponent, one of six girls, cackles away incomprehensibly and before long you have no cash again. What? Why? How?

Who knows?

All I know is that sometimes during a particularly explosive Kanji session, all my money would drift away. This game is hard. These animated women aren't parting with their clothes anytime soon.

Okay then. But there is something more sinister about All Tokimeki Mahjong Paradise Special Videos, oh-yes. The booklet is full of hand drawn pictures of naked cartoon girls, which is creepy in it's own right but then not as creepy as the head-shots of some real girls. And then there is a Date-Mode. The mind boggles - the nerves shudder and I wouldn't put it past them.

I saw a TV show in Japan once, where they technically beat-up via a collection of brutal challenges a group of particularly weedy looking Japanese men. The winner won the possibility of a date with a very pretty girl. Even though the chaps involved were battered black and blue, the girl still reserved the right to say "No date." Which she often did.

What evil lies within All Tokimeki Mahjong Paradise Special Videos? Who knows?

This game is rare even in Japan, and in case you were wondering, the answer is Betty.

3DO Kid.