An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time with the PS1 we inched closer to the end of August 1996 when we looked at Adidas Power Soccer, Beyond the Beyond, The Final Round, and The King of Fighters ’95. Though, Beyond the Beyond needed some extra space for full dissection.
When we were last with the 3DO we delved into the depths of multimedia smut when we looked at Mind Teazzer, NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet!, Night Trap, Novastorm, and Pataank.
Continuing our family-friendly run with the 3DO, we’re now looking at Pebble Beach Golf Links, Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, Putt Putt’s Fun Pack, Quarantine, and Real Pinball.
*** NOTICE: The second anniversary of this blogging project is coming up next week, 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. ***
**This post was originally published on 7/24/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Pebble Beach Golf Links
Developer: T&E Soft
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Date: 1994
Time to Raising My Handicap: 44 Minutes
Oh great, it’s this fucking game again. For anyone who doesn’t recall, we’ve encountered T&E Soft several times in the Saturn series, and even gave them special attention for Virtual Hydlide. I’ve written about these jokers quite a lot, and about this game specifically, more than I would ever want to, so let’s skip past the basic introduction.
It’s been more than a year-and-a-half since we saw Pebble Beach as a Saturn launch title, and the main thing I’ve learned in the intervening months is that the 3DO hell I lamented then is actually one of my own creation. I’m now like Sam Neill at the end of Event Horizon, I’ve embraced it. I also compared this game unfavorably to PGA Tour 96 and NES Open, which were my only two touch points at the time. I stand by the comparison, but now we have more games for this to compare unfavorably against, such as Tecmo World Golf and Valora Valley Golf, and several games that it somehow compares well against, such as The Final Round and World Cup Golf. In the wider scheme of things, that Saturn version of Pebble Beach is lower-mid tier instead of the worst thing ever. Notice how I specify the version.
That brings us to this piece of trash 3DO release. That’s right, my invective hasn’t calmed down, it’s just shifted. Functionally, this has all of the same gameplay content as the later Saturn version, but with a few important differences. First, being on the 3DO, it looks worse and moves at a lower framerate, if such a thing is possible. The look and feel of the Saturn version is downright pleasant in comparison. Second, and most importantly, the one and only saving grace of that later version does not exist at all here. That they got The Walrus just for the Saturn port speaks in that game’s favor, but it also means the 3DO original has been so much worse this whole time and I didn’t know it. The combination of shock, horror, and disgust at this discovery almost put me off this entire project. Yes, I’m being hyperbolic but what do you want from me, this game sucks.
Putt Putt Goes to the Moon
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Release Date: 1994
Time to One Small Putt For Cars: 26 Minutes
We last saw Putt Putt being paraded through town all the way back in our second ever batch of 3DO games. That game was a port of one of Humongous’ first games, and it showed. That studio would eventually become a powerhouse in children’s games, but they wouldn’t really get there until around ’95 or ’96. What we have here is the second Putt Putt game, released in ’93 for DOS and ported a year later to the 3DO. It was somewhat ridiculous for Ron Gilbert and Co. to even put out Fatty Bear and the first Putt Putt on the 3DO when that system launched in ’93, given the price point. It’s even more absurd to go back in for a second round after the system very clearly flopped. What kind of small child would even have had access to a 3DO? It’s less surprising that this and the accompanying Fun Pack will be the last we see of Putt Putt in this blog series.
The game itself follows everyone’s favorite unsupervised vehicular child as he wreaks havoc in a fireworks factory and gets literally blasted to the moon. There, he meets aliens, terrestrial animals on holiday, and the lunar buggy in a weird bit of Apollo 17 shaming. Putt Putt’s pet dog Pep is still along for the ride, being a problem because he’s a silly puppy. The types of puzzles and minigames here are on par with the previous Humongous entries we’ve seen, just with slightly more of them. Structurally, after the first handful of screens you’re deposited into a town area where you need to collect some number of things, which is how the previous game went except this time Putt Putt is on the moon. It feels like there’s slightly more stuff to collect, but that could just be me. The point-and-click adventuring is as simple as ever, because, again, it’s for small children, but unlike last time I didn’t feel particularly compelled to engage with it to completion. It’s still probably like an hour to hour and a half long for a grown adult, so there’s that.
I still can’t get over these things being on the 3DO. The damn thing was 3x more expensive than any other console, and any household which had young children and that kind of cash would have already had a PC. Maybe the port work wasn’t difficult, and they didn’t know until they tried? Maybe these ports were made to mess around with the power of the CD-ROM, coming from floppy disc development? Regardless, this is the end for Humongous on the 3DO, or it will be after the next game.
Putt Putt’s Fun Pack
Developer: Humongous Entertainment
Publisher: Humongous Entertainment
Release Date: 1994
Time to Winning At Checkers: 25 Minutes
I don’t know if this was put out alongside the previous game or separately, but this is now for real the last time we’re seeing Putt Putt. Like with Fatty Bear’s Fun Pack, this is a collection of six basic minigames that probably won’t hold anyone’s attention for very long. These include a tile matching thing, concentration, a word-guessing thing, checkers, a bizarre pinball thing, and tic-tac-toe. Checkers counts as the closest thing to gameplay in this package, but even on the hardest difficulty it’ll only keep an adult mildly engaged for a few minutes.
There’s significantly less to do here than in Fatty Bear’s pack, and it makes me wonder what Humongous was even trying to do. I mean, the tile thing isn’t really anything, tic-tac-toe always ends in a draw, and that pinball thing is massively inexplicable and doesn’t count towards anything. That leaves checkers and word-guessing, which functions like a set of first-grade level flashcards. Those would make sold parts of a more filled out package, but without anything around them this whole thing would have been a rip-off, even on DOS. This is just a weird piece of shovelware in Humongous’ otherwise solid early lineup.
Quarantine
Developer: Imagexcel
Publisher: GameTek
Release Date: 1994
Time to Oh This Is About Detroit Isn’t it: 22 Minutes
Enough of this kiddie stuff, I’m gonna go smoke cigarettes in the school bathroom and listen to music with cuss words in it. You can’t stop me, you’re not my real dad! Or, at least, that’s what I conceptualize edgy teens sounding like in the pre-social media era. These days that kind of kid is probably trawling Reddit to learn esoteric slurs and turning into a clerical fascist. It’s quaint now, but in the 90’s kids would “trigger the olds” by playing video games with gratuitous blood and violence. The fact that edgy media becomes quaint after their cultural moment passes tends to make them particularly disposable. Creators of edgy media know this on at least some level, so maybe that’s why most of this stuff is cheap and low effort. I mention all of this for no particular reason.
Quarantine sees you play as a cab driver in an apocalyptic, walled-off Detroit KEMO City. Where the set-up to Escape From New York occurred, except this time the water supply had been spiked, leading to a gradual die-off of the population in addition to everything else. The idea is that you need to do some first-person Crazy Taxi meets Twisted Metal stuff in a bland open world until you upgrade yourself enough to escape from the city. That should be a flattering comparison since this came out before either of those two games I compared it with, which on paper makes it ahead of its time. Unfortunately, because it is still of its time it ends up playing like a slipshod Carmageddon. The driving sucks, the UI sucks, the game mechanics don’t make much sense, the combat sucks, the taxi system is bad, and the whole thing comes across as unbalanced. The nicest thing I can say about the execution is that the opening FMV is appropriately unhinged.
Everything going on here is so off, that even the thought of picking all the nits is exhausting. Yet, this all only applies to the 3DO version. I couldn’t tell you whether the original PC release was any better, though for what it’s worth that one did review well. Additionally, the Saturn and PS1 ports of this thing reportedly fared even worse than this one, which really sounds like a bad time. Fortunately, and inexplicably, those were Japan only releases so we won’t have to worry about seeing this thing ever again.
I’m left with a nagging sentiment that it’s kind of wild how a game this bad could have so many forward-looking concepts. Maybe that’s because Imageexcel would go on to get bought out and turned into Rockstar Toronto. That’s right, the guys who made this would go on to have some involvement in the creation of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, not to mention primary responsibility for 2005’s The Warriors. I can kind of see it, to be honest.
Real Pinball
Developer: Japan DataWorks
Publisher: Panasonic
Release Date: 1994
Time to TILT: 25 Minutes
We end this batch with the most middling Pinball game I’ve yet seen, which is really saying something. Those other games, Last Gladiators for the Saturn and Extreme Pinball on the PS1, came out for later systems and were bottom feeders in those respective libraries. Real Pinball not only continues that trend but proves itself to be objectively worse than either of those releases.
Pinball video games are as old as video gaming itself, but I don’t think anyone got around to making a decent pinball simulation until the late 90’s. Physics engines, board design, and licensing would have all been headaches weighing down on any project, but that still wouldn’t have been an excuse to half-ass one of these as badly as we see here. This game contains five uninspiring original boards, with no kind of visual flair or creative use of the form of any kind. The physics are incredibly sketchy, with the ball itself clearly being a 2D sprite that shrinks and grows to simulate distance and uses obviously questionable collision detection. The only wrinkle in the overall package is that you need to achieve some hidden high score in the fourth pinball board in order to unlock the last one, which is something I didn’t have the patience for. Yet, as bad as it is, it still basically functions, which somehow makes it far from the worst thing we’ve seen during this journey.
This batch has been a real slog to write about, maybe due to the lackluster quality of the games or because I had just crashed through that giant write-up on Beyond the Beyond. Let’s update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games and get out of here.
1. Guardian War
…
18. Putt Putt Goes to the Moon
27. Putt Putt’s Fun Pack
42. Pebble Beach Golf Links
45. Real Pinball
49. Quarantine
…
60. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
Next time, we’re jumping back to the PS1 and crossing through to September 1996 by looking at NCAA GameBreaker, Project Horned Owl, Strike Point, and Bubble Bobble featuring Rainbow Islands.
After that it’s back to the 3DO in ’94 as we look at our third-to-last batch of the year with Seal of the Pharoah, Sesame Street: Numbers, Sewer Shark, Shadow: War of Succession, and Space Pirates. When I think I’m finally safe from American Laser Games, they show up where I least expect it.
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. Currently, I’m accelerating stardust on my d-cycle with a Yugioh 5D’s (nutz) game from 2009.
You can watch the stream archive featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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