An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Last we saw each other things got steamy, but not in a good way, when we looked at Mind Teazzer, NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet!, Night Trap, Novastorm, and Pataank.
Last time with the PS1 we had an iffy time looking at Tecmo Super Bowl, Madden NFL ’97, Jumping Flash! 2, and Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack’s Revenge.
We’re now reaching the end of August ’96 in as eclectic a way as possible with Adidas Power Soccer, Beyond the Beyond, The Final Round, and The King of Fighters ’95.
*** NOTICE: The second anniversary of this blogging project is coming up in three 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 to haunt me. ***
**This post was originally published on 7/10/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Adidas Power Soccer
Developer: Psygnosis
Publisher: Psygnosis
Release Date: 8/31/1996
Time to Grabbing My Shin: 64 Minutes
It feels like it’s been a while since we last saw a Soccer game, and I’m just now realizing how good we’ve had it. This also might be, as far as I can tell, Psygnosis’ first Soccer game ever, which, if true, would explain a lot. Adidas Power Soccer might be the worst one of these we’ve yet seen. The Soccer genre has fared decently well so far, with the lowest ranked competitors being Olympic Summer Soccer (63/123) for the PS1 and Worldwide Soccer (48/95) for the Saturn. I would also expect Soccer to be the one genre British developers wouldn’t screw up, seeing how sensible they tended to be, but here we are with a product that I would go so far as call kusoge, or perhaps ‘shigmey’ if we translate it to Bri’ish.
Let’s walk through the experience. After boot-up, the game introduces itself with the most tepid CG soccer match possible in the opening cinematic. This is followed by the most half-assed loading screen I’ve yet seen before mercifully throwing to a normal main menu. Most of the options and game modes are normal, except for the control settings. Games of this era either don’t have any way to view the controls or just show you a static image with the basic information. Here, the menu has individual pages for each move with an inset video that usually shows what it looks like. That’s pretty advanced, except for the fact that half of those videos are ads for the newest Adidas Predator™ cleated shoes. Also, something like half of the move set are illegal moves like shirt-pulling and drop-kicking, and it doesn’t even tell you the button combinations for those. None of it makes sense, and it only gets worse once the gameplay starts up.
For whatever reason, Psygnosis was only able to secure the rights for the major soccer clubs in England, France, and Germany. So, if you wanted to play as Real Madrid in your association soccer game, then you can get bent. Maybe those three countries were Adidas’ target markets? Regardless, once you pick a mode and a team, you’re thrown into a match. The immediate thing to note is that everything is polygonal, which might be a first for the Soccer genre and also the only nice thing I’ll say about this game. There are a variety of irritating nits with how this thing plays, such as the camera being too tight in, giving no situational awareness, or how the speed difference between running with the ball and without is too severe, or the wildly inconsistent ball stealing, or even how the run button is the same as the shoot button, which can cause you to immediately kick the ball after stealing it. But those are all small issues compared to the thing that makes this game unplayable: The AI.
You see, the opposing AI is absolutely psychotic. Opposing players are constantly on you and tackling, whether or not it’s a legal move. There’s a way to dodge tackles, but its effectiveness is extremely inconsistent. The teammate AI is also completely worthless, contributing neither to offense nor defense. When the opposing team has the ball, the AI tends to rapid-fire pass the ball with a situational awareness not possible for a human player given the on-screen information. When you throw all the various small issues into the mix, you get an abjectly miserable experience. The game is torn between wanting arcade game flow and simulation moves and ruleset, complicated by what have to be coding errors. Oh, and one of two Adidas ads play during halftime in every match, contributing to the overall unseriousness of the product. I genuinely hate this game, everything that it is and everything that it stands for.
Beyond the Beyond
Developer: Camelot Software Planning
Publisher: SCEA
Release Date: 8/31/1996
Time to Saving The World: 40 Hours
For reasons beyond all good sense, I’ve decided to play every PS1 JRPG to completion as I get to them. Or, I should say before I get to them in the schedule. I streamed myself playing this thing off-and-on over the course of a year, none of which is archived because whoops. That said, I will be streaming subsequent playthroughs and archiving them on my YouTube channel. So, how is the first proper JRPG on the PlayStation, a console known for that genre? It’s aggressively mid.
Beyond the Beyond was Camelot’s first game after spinning off from Sonic! Software Planning, and it shows. They even used a branch of the Shining Force engine to develop this thing. With everything considered, I suppose it’s impressive this game came together as well as it did, though the flaws in its design and execution are glaring obvious. Fortunately, it isn’t that long of a mess, being comparable to a mid-generation SNES JRPG. In a way this serves as one of the shallow steppingstones the industry used when figuring out how to adapt the RPG genre to CD based systems. Remember that however big and epic Final Fantasy VI or Chrono Trigger feel, they’re only a few megabytes. What should developers do with all the extra space afforded by discs? The best answer Camelot had was to make the biggest, most detailed sprites they could, which, sure. No one’s really going to figure it out until Square rolls onto the scene in ’97, so I can’t hold this lack of creativity against them. What I can hold against them is the inept RPG design, especially with Suikoden and Persona as contemporary releases. We’ll get to those games eventually.
In the meantime, The Beyond² needs slightly more room for analysis than a quick and dirty write up will provide, so look forward to a supplemental post in the coming days, where we delve into combat mechanics, world design, and how not to pace a fantasy adventure story.
The Final Round
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: 8/31/1996
Time to That’s In The Water: 50 Minutes
To complement the worst Soccer game we’ve yet seen, here’s the second worst Golf game we’ve seen! That’s right, this game is worse than any of T&E Soft’s garbage, even if it can’t reach the furthest depths of World Cup Golf. What makes this thing such contemptable trash? Well, unfortunately, it’s for all the usual reasons.
Not only does the game look and move like trash, there’s only one course, limited modes and options, clunky shot control, garbage putting, and a bizarre physics engine. No part of the experience has any value. Maybe the one interesting part is the two-stage swing mechanic. The shot power bar is simplified here from the standard three-button-press style; you hold the button to charge the bar, let go to let the power begin degrading, and then press again to stop the bar somewhere. They somehow made that whole process feel awkward and clunky. The innovation comes in the stage before the power bar, where you use button presses to stop horizontal and vertical bars moving across the face of a golf ball; the point where the two bars intersect is the spot you hit the ball. Theoretically, that should combine the accuracy component of the standard power bar with a spin/arc selector. The wonky physics makes any fine adjustments kind of pointless, though.
Other than the weird swinging, the putting is dismal, which might as well be par for this genre in the mid-90’s. Otherwise, it’s hard to fully communicate how little personality or oomph there is with any part of this thing. World Cup Golf is notable for being offensively bad, T&E Soft’s nonsense is memorable for their gnarly game engine and awkward FMV, PGA Tour is basically competent under a thin layer of EA’s shittification, and Tecmo World Golf has a truly psychotic number of courses. There’s something to latch onto with every other Golf game we’ve seen. Here, there’s nothing. This is such a nothing game that you can’t even really google anything about it, though that’s partially due to Konami giving this the same name in North America as one of their earlier Boxing games. This is definitely kusoge, but not enough to be worth talking about.
The King of Fighters ’95
Developer: SNK
Publisher: SCEA
Release Date: 8/31/1996
Time to Getting My Team Thrown: 37 Minutes
I have never played a King of Fighters game before in my life. Not once. I don’t know how that happened, I guess it never carried the same mainstream FOMO as Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat and always carried the vibe of being unapproachably technical. Maybe that’s just because SNK has, let’s say, a reputation. I didn’t even absorb much through osmosis, with my full knowledge being Terry’s trucker hat and Mai’s, well, yeah. Suffice it to say this was a learning experience.
KoF is a 3v3 Fighting game series that draws characters from other SNK franchises, most notably the earlier Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series. This was all news to me, and if people had known all this time that you could do inter-company brand crossovers that play like real video games, why has the gaming public put up with Smash Bros. for all these decades? The world is a mysterious place. Another mystery is that KoF seems to be popular everywhere other than the U.S., which I don’t have an answer to, since KoF ’95 is completely fine. It looks good (being an SNK game), moves well, has the correct soundtrack, and a ton of decently differentiated characters. I spent half an hour tooling around with it and didn’t find anything wrong with the fundamentals.
Though, this being the second one of these, the fighting mechanics are barebones in comparison to stuff like Street Fighter Alpha, making it more akin to a 2D Virtua Fighter than anything else. Maybe that’s why I thought it was too technical, there seems to be a heavier reliance on theory than throwing bullshit around. The modes on offer are also pretty limited, with just 1v1 sessions and the 3v3 ladder, but that just means it wasn’t on the bleeding edge for the time. As far as concrete criticism, the load times seriously hamper the game flow, which was also the main complaint attached to this PS1 conversion back in the day. So, I guess this is the worst version of a good game.
There’s still something intangible about it keeping KoF ’95 out of the top tier for me, and I can’t quite place the feeling. Like, I would take any of Capcom’s intermediary period Fighters over this and I can’t really tell you why. Also, I’ve decided to label Capcom’s Fighting games between the last Street Fighter II and the first Street Fighter III as that company’s intermediary period, because it’s like the messy eras you get in-between one dynasty collapsing and the next dynasty asserting dominance. Anyway, it feels right somehow to put KoF at the back of the upper tier of Fighting game franchises, and I don’t really have a good explanation for why.
As mentioned above, expect a follow-up addendum on Camelot’s first RPG in the coming days. You may have noticed that all these games have 8/31 as their release dates. The information I cobbled together for my schedule has six games released on that day. I’m not going to say whether or not I believe that to be true, but we can only work with what we have. It’s probably fine. Let’s update the Ranking of All PS1 Games and get out of here.
1. Air Combat
…
40. The King of Fighters ’95
48. Beyond the Beyond
100. The Final Round
112. Adidas Power Soccer
…
123. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time we see each other, we’re going to putter along further with the 3DO in 1994 as we look at Pebble Beach Golf Links, Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Putt Putt’s Fun Pack, Quarantine, and Real Pinball.
After that it’s back to PS1, where we get to move out of August and into September ’96 with NCAA GameBreaker, Project Horned Owl, Strike Point, and Bubble Bobble featuring Rainbow Islands. As of writing I have no idea what two of those are, so let’s find out together!
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. Legend of Grimrock II is in the rearview mirror and for some reason I’m now streaming a Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds (nutz) game.
You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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