All 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order: 1994 (Part 09)

An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.

Last time we continued with the PS1 in August 1996 when we looked at Tecmo Super Bowl, Madden NFL ’97, Jumping Flash! 2, and Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack’s Revenge.

When we last looked at the 3DO we found at least one bright spot in the ’94 release calendar when we looked at Gridders, Guardian War, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller, Mad Dog McCree, and Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold

Now, we have to somehow deal with our disastrous next batch of 3DO games by looking at Mind Teazzer, NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet!, Night Trap, Novastorm, and Pataank (pronounced “Puh-Tunk”).

***NOTICE: The second anniversary of this blogging project is coming up in four weeks, and like last time I’m going to attempt to do a Q&A. If you have any questions you want to ask, reply below or shoot me something through my contact page. It doesn’t even require a return email address, which is a decision I’m sure won’t come back around to bite me in the ass.***

**This post was originally published on 7/3/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**

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I knew going into this project that I would eventually have to confront some of the low-quality smut released for this console, I just wasn’t expecting to run into back-to-back instances of it. One of the big things with the 3DO was the extremely low bar to entry for developers. Remember that the per-unit licensing fee was less than half any other console and The 3DO Company exercised almost no control over what was allowed on their system. This led to the console seeing a wide variety of non-game multimedia junk, all of which are outside the purview of this project. A noticeable chunk of that multimedia garbage was pornographic, because CDs were the future, and the adult film industry has always ridden the leading edge of consumer technology. Inconveniently for us, a few of those smutty CDs had gamified elements, which puts them just over the line into our territory. Mind Teazzer and NeuroDancer are two of those “games”.

We can get through the descriptions of these things fairly quickly. Mind Teazzer is a collection of 12 extremely basic puzzles broken up into three categories, jigsaw, concentration, and sliding block, each of which reveals some kind of naughty picture with the player being rewarded with three-or-so minute long clips from low-rent pornos after each completion. It was apparently put out by a porn studio I had never heard of to, I guess, promote their VHS line-up. If it weren’t for the basic puzzle gimmick, I could have skipped this entirely.

Of more substantial note is NeuroDancer. The grifters who slapped this thing together put enough effort into it to be worth talking about and the lewd material itself is siloed off enough that I can even share screenshots of the SFW parts. The premise is that you play as some deadbeat living in a cyberpunk dystopia who does some futuristic phone phreaking in order to call up holographic strippers. That’s a funny premise and could have been the set-up for a real Adventure game if the developers were interested in anything other than the bare minimum. The end experience is a couple of menus where you can either pull up silly FMV clips, call up the girls, or send out a drone to hack phone boxes.

That hacking section is done in first person and consists of moving down a non-descript hallway and branching side paths to press a button in order to hack generic cyber panels, which will give you credits. The only mechanic here is in having to press that button again to disconnect from the panels before the cyber cops get you, which results in a game over. The thing is, you get the same number of credits from a panel no matter how long you wait, so there’s no reason to not just immediately disconnect every time. You only have to go to five panels to get as many credits as you’ll need to see all the content, so this sole gameplay section only requires a couple of minutes to complete. That takes us to the only reason why anyone would play this thing.

There are three FMV women who you can choose to show up as small, blurry holograms in the middle of the dingy UI who’ll perform poorly stitched together strip dances. Progressing to each stage in the stripping costs a set amount of the aforementioned credits. Once the dancer is topless, a bizarre and creepy minigame activates where you can select her upper, middle, or lower body and a hand will reach in from off-camera and start randomly stroking her in the most off-putting way possible. Eventually, the final sequence in each dance ends in the dancer showing her ass to camera. I’ve described the whole process in detail to illustrate how little of anything there is here. I know that before the internet took off guys had to acquire porn any way they could and make do with what they had, but even by those standards there’s nothing here. I can only conceptualize NeuroDancer as a grift relying solely on the novelty of limited multimedia interaction and enough guys not knowing any better.

Smut has always been an undercurrent in video games. From highly pixelated 8-bit dicks to multimedia softcore, to H-game dating sims, to modern Steam trash, low quality porn has been a constant presence. 99% percent of it has been on PCs, but occasionally some gunk drips onto consoles. Usually when the manufacturer doesn’t about quality control like with the 2600, 3DO, late Saturn, or that one random Xbox game. It usually doesn’t work out, business-wise, because consoles are mostly used in more public areas of homes than PCs and even lax manufacturers aren’t going to let the hard stuff through. That’s why it’s weird and novel when one of these does get released, at least in North America, even though they’re always garbage. That said, I’m not going to rank these two “games” and probably not any other porno game I run across during this project, as they would certainly make up the bottom of the list and that would give the worst non-adult titles more credit than they deserve. I’m not going to let Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties get off the hook that easily, even though probably only Mind Teazzer would rank below it.

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Night Trap

Developer: Digital Pictures

Publisher: Virgin Interactive

Release Date: 1994

Time to Getting My Plug Pulled: 25 Minutes

This is our fifth unique Tom Zito production and we’re only now circling around to the first and most famous entry in the Digital Pictures oeuvre. Night Trap likely has more documentary work made around it over the last 30 years than any other FMV game, and anything I write would be a rehash of a story that’s been told many times. The important points for looking at this as a video game are that it was originally filmed for VHS in the late 80’s, came out on the Sega CD in ’92, and got caught up in the political tomfoolery around violence in video games.

Being an interactive Movie, the plot is the point, and the premise is straightforward enough. There’s a family of vampires who use their teenage vampire daughter to lure non-vampiric teens to their fancy lake house in order to trap them and drain their blood with the help of their army of trash bag minions. You play as a S.C.A.T. cop who’s hacked into the vampire’s security system in order to assist an undercover S.C.A.T. agent, played by Dana Plato, in foiling the evil vampiric scheme via silly traps. It’s intentional B-horror schlock with mild PG-13 levels of violence; baby’s first exploitation movie, if you will. The quality of the footage, acting, writing, and action successfully hit that target, which is a baseline of competence that helps it age better than it should. Everything not involving gameplay was good enough at the time and remains so now. At the risk of unoriginality, the problem with this game lies in trying to play it.

Most of the scenes play themselves out regardless of input, with the player’s job being to flip between eight different camera views looking for garbage bag clad bad guys who you have to spring booby traps on with a button press. There are a handful of moments where those bad guys will attack one of the characters, and you usually need to time a trap to rescue that character or else get a game over. You can also game over from missing too many trap moments. The thing is, there are a metric ass ton of bad guys you need to get, and no indication when or where they will appear. If you watch the story scenes, you’ll quickly miss too many guys and lose, and if you don’t pay attention to the story scenes you might miss the chance to do a mandatory character rescue and lose. Even the strategy of continually cycling rooms and capturing what you can will only take you maybe halfway through the story before failing. That’s with the consequence of a game over being to start the whole thing over from the beginning.

It’s almost immediately apparent that this is a run-based game by design. You’re supposed to take multiple runs to see every event in every one of the eight rooms, writing down important timestamps as you go. A successful run is only like 35 minutes, so the whole process of solving the game shouldn’t take more than a few hours. That’s a novel way to tell an interactive story, even today, but there are two glaring problems. First, you’re not going to see a coherent set of scenes in a successful playthrough, which means that in order to beat this Interactive Movie you can’t watch the movie. Second, while watching a cheesy B-movie can be fun once, repeatedly rewatching disjointed pieces of one in a short time period would count as a special kind of hell for most people. It takes a hyper-specific type of person to see this experience through to the end as intended.

You can tell from the heavy reuse of the dozen or so standard trap scenes that the original incarnation of this thing wasn’t supposed to be that demanding on the player. That likely has to do with the original, failed, interactive VHS format, with the copy-pasting of those scenes being required to keep the pace up and stretch the overall play time for the Sega CD audience. I would hope that if it was designed from the start with the Sega CD in mind, they might have come up with a better solution to that pacing problem, but having already seen Double Switch, we know that this studio would end up doubling down on all the flaws seen in this game. It would be twenty years before anyone would try to make this general kind of piecemeal-FMV-puzzle-narrative work, and even then, the modern results are even more low-budget and end up as mixed bags in their own ways. Even still, Night Trap is better than most games we’ve seen so far on the 3DO.

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Novastorm

Developer: Psygnosis

Publisher: Psygnosis

Release Date: 1994

Time to Arbitrarily Dying: 25 Minutes

Yet another Sega CD port, and one that we’ve already covered way back in Part 007 of the PS1 series. I wasn’t a fan of Novastorm then, and I’m still unconvinced after playing a worse version of it. Now, it’s by no means the worst pre-rendered Rail Shooter I’ve seen, that highly specific honor goes to Microcosm, but it’s also nowhere close to being good. The nonsensical opening still doesn’t convey anything about the premise, the game still moves like a mid-00’s flash game, and the levels are still poorly designed. There’s even the fun little difference in this version where you don’t see the bosses’ health bars, they don’t react to damage, and each one runs on an invisible time limit for no particular reason. This is one of those bad games that isn’t bad enough to be all-time garbage and lacks enough personality to at least be fun to laugh at. It exists in that awkward zone between mediocre and so-bad-it’s-bad where it’s just kind of junky and uninteresting. This will be the last we speak of it.

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PaTaank

Developer: PF Magic

Publisher: Crystal Dynamics

Release Date: 1994

Time to Losing The Graphics: 8 Minutes

On paper this game sounds completely nuts. PaTaank (“Puh-Tunk”) is a third-person pinball game where you have intermittent control over an anti-gravity pinball on four different giant tables. Those tables have quests associated with them that are similar to what you would find on real, overcomplicated pinball boards and you have semi-direct control of the ball according to an energy meter which you have to manage. That description sounds like a video game that could be either good or bad! Sadly, this is now the second game we’ve covered that experiences a fatal emulation hardware bug rendering the graphics into a featureless void.

I’m more saddened about not being able to dig into this one more than I was with DinoPark Tycoon. I could immediately tell what that other game was going to be without playing it, but this one looks like it messes with the pinball concept in a way I haven’t seen before. Contemporary reviewers seem to have either given a thumbs-up to the idea or been thoroughly repulsed by it, and I wanted to get in on that action. This also would have given me an opportunity to dump on Crystal Dynamics, which I haven’t had a chance to do for a while, and introduce the shit merchants at PF.Magic. Ah well, I think Ballz 3D is coming up at some point so that can wait. This is an anticlimactic way to end a post, but that’s the 3DO for you.

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Well, this wound up being almost a complete wash. Tom Zito isn’t the hero we want, he isn’t the hero we need, he’s just the hero we have around. Let’s update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games so we can sketchily rent these sticky VHS’s and get out of here.

1. Guardian War

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20. Night Trap

34. Novastorm

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55. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties

Next week we’re melodramatically holding our shins and limping back to the PS1 in August ’96 with Adidas Power Soccer, Beyond the Beyond, The Final Round, and The King of Fighters ’95.

After that we’ll continue our wholesome, family friendly journey through the 3DO catalog when we look at Pebble Beach Golf Links, Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Putt Putt’s Fun Pack, Quarantine, and Real Pinball.

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You can find me streaming two or three times 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 have going on. I’m currently within smelling distance of beating The Legend of Grimrock II.

You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.