"Come forward in succession little sized bomb".
This is exactly the kind of pearl of wisdom you would expect from a far eastern game made in the mid-nineteen-nineties.
for the 3DO. You've never heard of it right? Well only the true 3DO hardcore have and even fewer have played it.
I am, and I have.
And I'm grateful. Grateful to have played an excruciatingly rare Korean game for the 3DO, and grateful to the person I acquired it from. Which, if I'm honest, is going to make slagging it off somewhat hard.
Whenever you are fortunate enough to get your hands on a rare game, there is part of you that has already decided it's going to be the best thing ever, even before you have seen it, let alone played it. This, in so far as 3DO is concerned, has wore a little thin with me. I wanted, oh-so desperately, all the little Warp rarities for the 3DO to be awesome - fact was they were a little ropey. I wanted Pyramid Wars to be amazing, it was, if I'm cold and honest, below par but then I have been lucky too. For every mouthful of rabbit dropping I stuffed in my eager 90s gamer mouth, I also found a couple of chocolate raisins. Dr Hauzer I enjoyed enormously, like wise Crayon Shin Chan, but the fact remains, i still have a gob full of rabbit plop.
So, what's Armageddon? Rabbit Pooh? Or M&M? I'll start with the good things.
Firstly it ticks a lot of boxes for me. Not least of all the music. Suitably heroic and quite good. I liked it. More cheese than the average diary farm but hey!
Next we have the fully rendered intro. Now, I've seen a lot of these. An aweful lot. Pre-rendered space scenes, with spaceships came with every 3DO game ever made. Pinball game? No problem - needs some pre-rendered space though. Football game? More space. Space game? Needs lots and lots of space. Pre-rendered space with everything. I am, if I am nothing, an world expert on pre-rendered space full-motion-video in 3DO games. Now, Armageddon isn't obviously Wing Commander III quality, neither is it Space Hulk but then it's not Starcraft either. It's good solid pre-rendered space and I liked it. It owes a thanks or two to the beginning sequences of Return of the Jedi but that's not what's important, what's important is how good it is. And it's good.
It also features Korean styled anime characters. Which ticked a big box. So that cheered me up.
the finally big thing is the dodgy translation. Dodgy translations is a thing of yester-year. And frankly I miss them. Armageddon has loads of completely unintelligible translations. And I liked that too. It's like it hearing a rubbish old song from years back you never really liked. There is something of the familiar about it, and I liked it.
So, once you've loaded it up, enjoyed the FMV, looked quizzically at the translations and tapped your foot to the heroic music what's the game like?
Not good.
Like most space games it focuses on dodging asteroids, which in the case of armageddon can be done by holding down left or indeed right. Shooting alien spaceships, which are quite hard to hit, exploding disaapointingly and don't look very good and finally weaving up and down to dodge plasma ray things and finally shooting an honest to goodness end-of level boss. Which is sadly just a pair of polygons glued to gether.
The controls are tough, the targetting impossible and all told it's a bit deflating. It's hard to avoid the enemy bullets which is all well and good but the big crime is the end of level of bosses. I was expecting something appraoching impressive. If I am honest the game looks like it might have been shooting for impressive. missing horribly but still aiming but the end of level polygons are little heart breaking.
And that's all I can say. I enjoyed the experience. And who wouldn't? This is a rare game on a rare platform but if I measure the game as a game - it isn't up to much.
So finally? Is it rare? Very very very rare.
3DOKid.
