An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last week we saw our first batch of PS1 games from July 1996 with Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Gunship, SimCity 2000, and Bogey Dead 6.
When we last left off with the 3DO, we looked at the final group of 1994 releases for which I had hard dates, Off-World Interceptor, Strahl, Shanghai: Triple-Threat, Starblade, and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Slayer.
It is now time for this blog feature to abandon all pretense at chronology, because we’re starting on our alphabetized list of undated 1994 releases. I hope you’re ready for Another World (Out of This World), Cannon Fodder, Club 3DO: Station Invasion, Corpse Killer, and Cowboy Casino.
**This post was originally published on 6/2/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Another World
Developer: Interplay
Publisher: Interplay
Release Date: 1994
Time to Disintegration: 28 Minutes
Whelp, we’re only one game into the alphabetical list and I’ve already gone and goofed up. The original title of this thing in Europe is Another World, but it was released in North America as Out of This World and both names seem to hold equal cultural cache. The source of that cache stems from its usage and progression of the visual techniques originating from the earlier Jordan Mechner games Karateka and Prince of Persia. At the time of its original release in 1991, the thing that separated Another World from its technical inspirations was that it took the rotoscoped platforming framework and, well, got both French and Impressionistic with it.
Le art of it all is the source of the lasting impact this thing had on the video game industry. The striking artwork and smooth rotoscoped sprite animation combined with the framing of the cutscenes and complete lack of UI, dialogue, or exposition served to create strong surreal vibes that would have been unheard of in games at the time. None of the individual components or scenes impress on their own, but it all comes together in an audio-visual experience that you would have to concede as being genuinely artistic. As this game was gradually ported outside of the Amiga/Atari ST cesspit, it would spread low-key influence throughout international game development. It wasn’t the most obviously influential PC game of the early 90’s, or even the most influential French game of the early 90’s (bonjour, Alone in the Dark), but the conceptualization of games as artistic works wouldn’t have developed as it did without this thing hanging around in the historic record.
So, that’s all pretty highfalutin, so how come this game isn’t brought up more often by the second-most annoying people on the internet? The answer becomes clear when attempting to interact with the damnable thing. It’s as much of a puzzley Adventure game as it is an Action Platformer, each scene the game drops you into requires quickly performing a highly specific series of precise inputs that you only figure out through trial and error. Doing anything incorrectly leads to instant death and reloading the last password checkpoint, though at least the loads are quick, and you only get set back by at most a couple of minutes. In a way it’s like a QTE game that doesn’t tell you what to press or when. Something like 90% of the time spent with this thing will be devoted to figuring out what you’re even supposed to do at any given moment. On top of that, if you did get all the inputs right the first time, the game is only around half an hour long. The extremely hostile design is very much of its time, and I imagine most people who’ve played it never reached the end.
That makes Another World one of the early examples of the tension between the artistic expression of a game and the realities of its gameplay. Gatekeeping in art is usually done by the people surrounding the artform, not the works themselves. Yet, video games by their most primordial nature actively try to prevent the audience from experiencing them. There have been wide swings back in forth over the years attempting to resolve that tension, but each time the medium invariably ends up back where it started.
At the risk of becoming the second-most annoying type of poster on the internet, let’s take this game as an example. You have the previously mentioned impressionistic storytelling and surreal atmosphere created by using the existing technology in novel ways, which is artistically noteworthy. To experience the entirety of that, you have to bang your head against constantly repeating the same scenes over and over until you perfect the demanded abstruse inputs. Does that process of interaction have any meaning or artistic value either on its own or in relation to everything else? Not really. There are games where constant failure is utilized to make a point or add meaning, but that’s not going on here. The gameplay is structured this way because there’s only half an hour of stuff to experience and the runtime needs to be padded so players can get their money’s worth. This is one of the games that would inspire later generations to use game mechanics in thematic or artistic ways, but this thing itself doesn’t do so. This conflict creates the kind of barrier to entry that makes the game objectively kind of an artistic failure, though an Atari ST game of all things getting this close would have been a major accomplishment for ’91.
That brings us to what we’re actually looking at today. We’re playing our 3DO Interactive Multiplayer™ in 1994, two years after Another World had been ported to DOS, SNES, and Genesis. This 3DO release is a far superior version of the game than the other two console ports, which have more simplified graphics and run at half the performance. So, this would have been the second-best way to play this thing behind the DOS version, though I don’t see why you would buy a three-year-old PC game for your new, expensive console. Also, I somehow missed some key control features even though I tested out all three buttons, so I had a rougher time with this than I probably should have. Remember to read the software documentation, folks. But otherwise, it runs well and is just a superior game to the 16-bit ports.
I still don’t know what to make of the experience, though. I can’t bring myself to call it good because of how miserable it is to play, but there’s too much quality for me to call it bad. In fact, it’s one of the highest quality products we’ve seen for the 3DO, yet the idea of putting it at the top of the ranking feels wrong. We’ll be getting to Flashback soon enough, so let’s stick a pin in this and revisit the topic later.
Oh, and before you ask, Another World is an Isekai.
Cannon Fodder
Developer: Sensible Software
Publisher: Virgin Interactive
Release Date: 1994
Time to Squad Wipe: 15 Minutes
That last game gave us some trouble because it inherently demanded to be taken seriously, but that won’t be an issue with this stupid hunk of trash. Cannon Fodder is a top-down Run-and-Gun shooter similar to stuff you could have found in Arcades and on the NES in the late 80’s, except this one has a point-and-click interface. The gimmick is that you have control of a squad of soldiers, even though they follow each other in a line so you’re just controlling the first guy. There’s also supposed to be humor and satire in here somewhere.
Originally released for the Amiga in 1993 by Sensible Software, yes the soccer developers, this apparently served as the closest thing to a real video game that Amiga enthusiasts had seen, judging by the contemporary accolades. It looks and sounds like an Amiga game, the level design is uninspired, the encounter design is actively bad, and the unit pathing is hilariously basic. There’s not a lot to write home about. This is one of the examples that can be brought up for how mediocre games would have seemed like all-time classics for people who were only used to playing things on the Zed Ex Spectrum and Amiga. As for this 3DO port, it’s fine. It runs well enough, and even though the controls translate poorly to a gamepad, it’s still basically usable.
The only thing differentiating this game is its insistence on attempting anti-war satire. You see, kids, war is bad. It strips soldiers and everyone in their path of any semblance of personhood, inflicts the most horrific depravity, death, and destruction anyone could possibly imagine, and benefits only parasitic warmongers who sate their endless thirst on the blood of all men. To communicate this point, Cannon Fodder has the player control cartoony little Vietnam-era GIs who are anonymous in all but name and shoot endless hordes of nameless, faceless enemies in levels with silly titles. It’s supposed to be light and fun, you see. It’s trite and easily dismissed, except it apparently wasn’t at the time.
The game uses the Remembrance Poppy as its logo. This means nothing to me, a freedom loving American, but it’s a symbol representing war dead in the Commonwealth. Its usage still means nothing to me, even with the context, but one of the British tabloids decided to raise a stink about it back in ’93, which caused enough controversy to rope in comments from an MP and legal action from the British Legion. Virgin eventually removed the flower from the box art, because heaven forbid your anti-war media product have anything resembling an edge. I’ve been to Britain, it’s not a real country.
Club 3DO: Station Invasion
Developer: Studio 3DO
Publisher: The 3DO Company
Release Date: 1994
Time to Violating Child Labor Laws: 63 Minutes*
Now it’s time for a 3DO original. Not only that, but this is the direct follow-up to the canonical 1993 3DO game of the year, Twisted: The Game Show. What’s the worst that could happen?
It’s difficult for me to find the words for this thing. Fundamentally, this is a local multiplayer minigame collection with a linear structure and FMV interstitials. Those minigames themselves are the lamest edutainment junk possible and there’s a highly limited variety, with maybe a dozen types in total. These things are either simple trivia questions, math problems, or basic puzzles and have nothing going for them. Points are scored by succeeding at these things and the player with the most points after like eight rounds wins. A full five-player game could take between 60 and 90 minutes. That foundation would make this an anonymous pre-You Don’t Know Jack party game, except for the FMV.
Hoo boy. So, the premise is that a bunch of children have bought out a failing TV station and have decided to put out their own programming, with the fake TV shows and their hosts making up the character select going into a game. There’s an unexplained phenomenon investigation show, soap opera, game show, talk show, and sitcom. Each kid will do bits between rounds related to their show, with a sixth kid serving as the overall host/announcer. All of the shows are trying to spoof real contemporary TV shows through the theoretical lens of 10–12-year-old children. That means these child actors had to play children who’re attempting to act like adult TV personalities but can’t fully maintain character because they’re kids. To make things worse, all the FMV scenes take place in nightmarish MS Paint style virtual sets. The production is trying to have an early 90’s Nickelodeon vibe, but they miss the mark and land somewhere uncanny.
It’s difficult to communicate the immediate wrongness pervading this experience. Is this FMV cursed, cringe, a cognitohazard, or a cult classic? I don’t know if I can tell. The gameplay is actual garbage, so we at least don’t have to worry about classifying this thing as ‘good’. I would advise watching a playthrough (like the one below) and judging for yourself, but maybe you shouldn’t. I originally booted this thing up during a charity stream to try to inflict psychic damage onto my cohost, but he was too sleep-deprived to notice, and I wound up only hurting myself. That stream is also why my minute count is so high. Let’s never speak of this again.
Corpse Killer
Developer: Digital Pictures
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 1994
Time to Knowing How To Use This Thing: 14 Minutes
We last saw this on the Saturn in November ’95, where I found it to be fascinating but borderline unplayable. That was the enhanced edition, and there’s actually some difference between these versions. For one, the video quality and scrolling on the 3DO is much worse. Shocking, I know. But more importantly, the gameplay is massively simpler. The enhanced version had a habit of throwing bullshit at the player faster than the d-pad reticule could move around the screen, hurting the look and feel. This original version has like a third as many enemies spawn into the levels and they come from like half as many spots. Maybe that only applies to the early game, and it ramps up to that higher severity over time, but even then, the existence of a difficulty curve is surprising on its own. Aside from that, it’s still this game. This is probably better than the contemporary Sega CD/32X version, for what that’s worth. I would even choose this over the Saturn version, if I ever had the desire to play this thing to completion, but someone should physically stop me if I ever get to that point.
Cowboy Casino
Developer: The Computer Studio
Publisher: IntelliPlay
Release Date: 1994
Time to Sharing The Money With The Monkey: 27 Minutes
We’re now faced with our last game, and thus the last PC port of the week. Everybody loves both video poker and cowboy tropes, so why not combine the two? Cowboy Casino was originally sold as a multimedia instructional program that taught you how to play various types of poker. Four, to be precise. There’s five card draw, five card stud, seven card stud, and Texas hold ’em. You choose four out of five available personalities to play against, and you play on a round-by-round basis with the ability to change types and bet settings between rounds. Each asshole character will have little FMV scenes pop-up sometimes depending on your performance, which is supposed to add flavor. The game also came with a poker teaching booklet and there’s an extensive hint system, so maybe someone could learn something from this.
Though, the AI is basic enough that it isn’t going to give you a feel for the social strategy involved. Personally, what’s the point of poker if you can’t bluff? Speaking of the social aspect of the game, let’s talk about those characters. There’s an old coot miner, a pompous nouveau riche guy, a Clint Eastwood impersonator, an old gunslinger, and a “Mexican”. The depiction of these tropes ranges from poor to offensive, and to add insult to injury there’s a low variety of FMV scenes, so they start repeating themselves pretty quickly. The closest comparison to this I could think of is 2010’s Poker Night at the Inventory, but this is a beyond primitive implementation of the concept. Also, I somehow didn’t win a single hand of poker during my entire time with this thing, so it can fuck off.
I hope you had as much fun with these all-time classics as I did, the 3DO is the gift that keeps on giving retro gaming content. Let’s update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and then pretend we don’t know each other.
1. Road Rash
…
9. Corpse Killer
15. Another World
22. Cannon Fodder
29. Club 3DO: Station Invasion
38. Cowboy Casino
…
44. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
Next time, we’re shifting back over to the PS1 to continue through July ’96 with Robo Pit, Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Star Fighter, and Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation to Darkness.
After that, it’s back on the 3DO grind with DinoPark Tycoon, Drug Wars, FIFA International Soccer, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, and Fun ‘n Games. I have a feeling I’m going really rip into a couple of those.
I stream around twice 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. I’m currently playing Legend of Grimrock 2 as badly as possible for a GBCER donation incentive, because who doesn’t like to shout obscenities at slimes every now and then.
You can watch below the stream archive where I played the games featured in this not-at-all disastrous blog:
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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