An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Last time, we resumed our 3DO adventures with the non-chronological list by looking at Another World (Out of This World), Cannon Fodder, Club 3DO: Station Invasion, Corpse Killer, and Cowboy Casino.
Last time with the PS1, we began July ’96 with, just, so many ports by looking at Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Gunship, SimCity 2000, and Bogey Dead 6.
We’re now going to blaze our way through most of the rest of July by looking at Robo Pit, Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996, Star Fighter, and Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation to Darkness.
**This post was originally published on 6/6/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Robo Pit
Developer: Altron
Publisher: Kokopeli Digital Studios
Release Date: 7/10/1996
Time to Poking Them Off The Edge: 73 Minutes
We’re kicking things off with a game that genuinely surprised me. When I saw the title “Robo Pit” my mind envisioned a fighting game like Zero Divide or a Genki style mech shooter. Instead, we have a robot customization action game in the same vein as the later Custom Robo. I guess it’s technically a Fighting game because combat consists of 1v1 battles, but it uses a standard third person view and the jump from Jumping Flash. So, I guess this thing is kind of like a cross between Mechwarrior, Jumping Flash, and Battle Arena Toshinden. That comparison is a disaster, but the game itself is good, which I find endlessly impressive.
The set-up is straightforward. You need to build a robot and fight your way up a 100-step tournament ranking against other robots made from the same toolset. There isn’t a hard ladder or bracket, it’s one of those games where you win or lose ranking points by winning or losing to the other fighters, kinda like in Center Ring Boxing. Defeating an opponent will also let you take one of their equipped weapons and conversely a loss means they take one of your equipped weapons. There is something like 30 or so weapons in the game, and your robot’s progression relies on gaining per weapon experience through usage. Those weapons included various levels of punch and shield, along with a range of melee and ranged weapons including slightly whacky stuff like palm strike or a grappling claw. The actual customization of the robots is simple, you choose a body and legs with different options having different stats and one weapon for each arm. The robot building is basic by our standards, but this is a year before Armored Core and the only earlier game I could find with robot customization is 1995’s Mechwarrior 2, so this is kind of a novel mechanic.
Fighting through the ranks involves 1v1 battles with any robot who is +/- 20 ranks from you. Lower ranked opponents have lower quality weapons, less experience with those weapons, and pay out fewer points after getting slapped around. Ranks are based on overall point total and the other robots can move up and down the order on their own between rounds in addition to changing up their loadout. The fights themselves take place in moderately sized 3D arenas and feel like a 3rd person Jumping Flash! That’s trying to behave like Battle Arena Toshinden. Each arena has physical features to navigate around and oddly generous fall protection at the edges. What I mean by that is if a hit pushes a robot to the edge, it won’t take them off the edge, they have to be pushed again while on the edge to go over. That’s a good way for these kinds of Fighting games to work. Yet, there are only a handful of arenas in total, and you get to know them very well very quickly. The enemy AI is also really basic and could be easily solved by an observant player in about an hour or two.
I found that fights tended to boil down to dodging enemy ranged attacks until they ran out of ammo, shooting them from a distance until I ran out of ammo, and then trading blows back and forth while trying to push them towards the edge. Each robot has two special moves, which spend an energy bar that builds up by either giving or receiving damage. I found that winning the damage race boiled down to dodging the opponent’s specials while landing my own. Though, the robots have enough health that whittling either bar to zero can take most of the 99 second fight clock, which makes ring outs a more efficient tactic, when possible. Aside from the generous edge safety, various weapons have different abilities for either generating knockback or lessening it, so only about a third of my wins were ring outs due to technical necessity.
The fact that there are tactical considerations, progression, balancing, and trade-offs makes this thing so much better designed than the actual garbage we’ve been looking at for the last while. Now, is it as well designed as contemporary Capcom Fighting games? Good lord, no. Yet, I’d choose Robo Pit over any of the 3D Fighting games we’ve yet seen. Not that there aren’t issues. The movement feels weird due to the animation priority, the hitboxes aren’t great, and there’s literally nothing going on around the fight ranking except for a few contextless boss fights sprinkled around. The 2-player mode is the only additional feature on offer, which means this game has been stripped of everything that isn’t mechanically necessary, making for a barebones package. Still, what it does is good enough on its own to support the overall experience. Oh, and the music is way cooler than it has any right to be.
This is one of those forgotten classics that I accidentally stumble onto every now and then with this project. That classification begs the question of why this game is as obscure as it is. For one, it didn’t review that well at the time, with most outlets finding it too cartoony and simple. Then there’s the obscurity of the developer, Altron. They were apparently a port house for most of the 8- and 16-bit eras, only branching out into original productions for the PS1. Aside from Robo Pit and its sequel, they put out some weird puzzle games and a murder mystery thing. I guess nothing really took off, as they went back to localizing Nickelodeon games to Japan in the 00’s before turning to pumping out phone garbage in the 10’s. It’s kind of sad, because it looks like they were creatively onto something back in the late 90’s. So, yeah, this game had no juice behind it, and it seems to have been too uncool for most people at the time. We’ll see this again on the Saturn before too long, so I’ll wait until then to have the final word on the game.
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
Developer: Silicon Dreams Studio
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Release Date: 7/18/1996
Time to I’ll Bet His Hands Are Stinging: 48 Minutes
I eulogized U.S. Gold and walked through their whole deal a while ago, and yet the bastards aren’t quite dead yet. They had one last Soccer game left in them before the owner sold off and salvaged the scraps fully into Silicon Dreams, and much to my surprise this thing boots and runs like a real video game.
As the name suggests, this is a branded tie-in to the 1996 Olympics, but only for soccer, which makes for a convenient enough excuse to slap some new branding over an existing World Cup tie-in and call it a day. Or it would be if this wasn’t a new console generation requiring a new engine to get made from the ground-up. Maybe the branding is there in an attempt to entice literally anyone to buy this thing. They needed all the help they could get as this is the most mid-tier soccer game I’ve yet seen for these systems.
We’ve looked at soccer games that are weird messes, like Worldwide Soccer, mildly annoying, like FIFA, and kind of good, like Goal Storm, but this is the first one where all the positives and negatives balance out to exactly zero. First, the positives, it basically works like a soccer game, has intelligible ball movement, reasonable player control, plenty of modes, and a fun little animation for when a player gets carded. On the other side of the ledger, the close-in camera makes situational awareness almost impossible, the whole thing is mildly fugly, and the teams are wildly unbalanced. They made the England team murderous compared to other countries, the pricks. That all adds up to a whole lot of not much to write home about. Maybe the deranged opening cinematic puts it like one toenail over the line into above average. My only real takeaway is the surprise that this U.S. Gold joint wasn’t a steaming pile of garbage.
Star Fighter
Developer: Krisalis Software
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 7/18/1996
Time to Death By Stereo: 68 Minutes
That last game was too basically competent, let’s look at an insane mess instead. This thing is like an onion of weirdness, even though from the outside it looks like Shockwave Assault with Magic Carpet‘s graphics, which is a damning analogy if there ever was one. Yet, behind the surface is some stuff that puts me at a loss to explain.
First, let’s describe the game itself before falling down any rabbit holes. This is a flight combat game where you control a futuristic space fighter running missions over various terrestrial maps with objectives to blow up certain ground and air targets. There are like 15 missions that gradually increase in size and severity as you would expect. The details are where things start to get weird. First, the controls are kind of insane. Instead of handling like any other Flight game, rotating the starfighter doesn’t turn the plane, instead it just kind of rotates on a point and the up and down inputs need to be used to move in a direction. The exception is when it’s inverted, in which case up will go down, which is up on the screen. This is notably not a 6DoF game, which was the alternate acceptable control scheme for Flight games at the time. Star Fighter inhabits a weird middle ground between the two that feels uncanny.
Then there’s the upgrade system. Blowing up buildings or enemies will make them drop a few different types of large floating crystals, giving you a few seconds to collect them and add them to a kind of inventory. When you collect certain combinations of crystals, you’ll get something. Those somethings consist of ammo or equipment refills or a basic power-up. To get specific refills you need to memorize the combinations and get lucky with drops. Basically, it’s a poker style system, which is nuts to have in one of these. Getting those refills is vital, because your loadout at the end of a mission carries over to the next mission. You don’t select loadouts or start each level fresh, it’s all acquire onsite. That gets onerous with the amount of crap littering the levels ramping up significantly as the game goes on.
Finally, there are two uncommon game mechanics used here which are almost certainly the reason for the graphical and performance issues with this thing. For no particular reason, this game has destructible terrain. When the ground gets hit, not only is there an exaggerated animation where the ground texture is burned away, but the terrain will deform. So, you’ll end up poking craters in the landscape while chasing vehicles around with your pea shooter. There’s no reason for this feature to exist in this game and was only implemented because they could. Then, each level features the ability to fly up and out of atmosphere into orbit over the map, like a 90’s No Man’s Sky. I guess some of the later missions have space targets in addition to the ground and air stuff.
If you think that sounds like a lot of physics and rendering to put on a 32-bit console, then you would be right. The use of distance fog is heavy, and the intermittent slowdown can get severe. It also kinda looks like ass on top of that as well. Oh, and there’s something going on with the soundtrack that we will just acknowledge and not even try to touch.
Then there’s the lineage of this thing, which might add some needed context to all the weirdness. Moving backwards, what we see here is a direct port of the 1995 3DO release of the same name. That’s right, even though the damn thing was dead by mid-’96, there’s still no escaping 3DO ports. Yet, that itself was a remake of 1993’s Starfighter 3000. Does anyone want to guess that game’s initial system? No? Fine. This fucking thing was an Acorn Archimedes original. That name appropriately does absolutely nothing for most of you reading this, but it’s a really weird topic to come up in a PS1 blog series. The Archimedes was an also-ran British PC from the early-90’s, made as a consumer-facing follow-up to the BBC Micro. For context on that, the BBC Micro seems to have been to British schools what the Apple II was to American schools in the 80’s. The Archimedes didn’t really go anywhere and was eventually paved over by the same market forces that killed Commodore and Atari, but that’s not why it was interesting. This thing was the first consumer PC made using an ARM processor, because ARM was invented by Acorn. Yeah, that ARM. This is a weird piece of trivia. In relation to Star Fighter, that’s only relevant because the two guys who developed the original game were also the ones who made the 3DO port, which was a system that also used an ARM processor, and that might be why it was their initial console of choice.
I can’t in good conscious call this game good, but it also isn’t bad. Most games in that category are bland and mediocre, but in this case there’s so much weird, memorable nonsense going on that it both hurts the experience and keeps it from being mid. This is probably the most interesting British game I’ve yet seen in this project.
Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation to Darkness
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Release Date: 7/25/1996
Time to Making A Deal With The Devil: 52 Minutes
While we’re on the topic of weird shit, let’s look at Deception. I’m not typing out that whole name, you can’t make me. I’ve heard of this series but never played any of the games, though III and IV have always seemed interesting. I came into this expecting an anime combo-based Dungeon Keeper kind of experience, not knowing any better, but this thing turned out to be so much wonkier.
Like the later games in the series, the conceit here revolves around setting traps in a spooky mansion and using those to kill a variety of adventurers. The trick is that you need to trigger the traps manually while kiting your victims onto the correct spots while they try to kill you. Buying and placing traps costs money and MP, which you get from killing guys, with some limited item management involved. Unlike later entries, traps can only be placed from one specific room and, most importantly, this stupid thing is in first-person. Those attributes, added to the iffy timing for triggering traps and the expected issues with PS1 controls, makes the whole experience feel extremely finicky. For a game with such novel and unique mechanics, it also does a bad job of explaining itself, relying on a combination of trial-and-error and just looking up what you’re even supposed to do. The bungling of the user experience and encounter design, which gets solved in later games, turns something that should be compelling and entertaining into the opposite.
Yet, the stuff going on around the gameplay is unhinged enough to carry my interest further than it has any right to. The premise here is that you play as a disgraced prince from a generic fantasy kingdom who is falsely accused of killing the king. During your execution, you’re suddenly teleported to THE CASTLE OF THE DAMNED, which I hear is nice this time of year. There, your protagonist has to seize control of the premises and harvest souls as magic juice to summon literal Satan. If you can’t tell, you aren’t supposed to be a good guy, driven to evil for the sake of revenge and whatnot. This game gets morbid and dark, sometimes right up to the line of being 2edgy4me.
Yet, there’s a constant undercurrent of goofy, B-movie absurdity that keeps the whole thing at the level of a farce. The traps themselves err on the side of cartoonishness, such as the giant foot that comes down from the ceiling to stomp on people or the pit trap that’ll produce Looney Tunes-ass falling and thud noises when an enemy falls in them. That combines with the campy straightforwardness of the dialogue and dubious translation to create the kind bizarre vibe which usually didn’t get ported outside of Japan in the 90’s. In that way I’d call this a successful failure? It’s miserable to play but fun to look at.
This was an unusually eventful week, and likely a harbinger for the rapid-fire notable releases coming in the Fall. We still have a ways to go, though, so let’s go ahead and update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get out of here.
1. Air Combat
…
7. Robo Pit
35. Star Fighter
42. Tecmo’s Deception: Invitation to Darkness
58. Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
…
111. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time we see each other we’ll be having a really good and cool time looking at the hot 1994 3DO games DinoPark Tycoon, Drug Wars, FIFA International Soccer, Flashback: The Quest for Identity, and Fun ‘n Games. How many of those are going to be total write-offs? Check-in to find out!
When we next come back to the PS1, we’re going to cross into August ’96 by looking at The Hive, Triple Play 97, Worms, and NFL Full Contact. August is going to be Football month, so get your jockstraps ready.
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 through 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.
My stream showing off these games is archived and can be watched below:
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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