An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Last time, we FMV-ed our way through the 3DO catalog with Seal of the Pharoah, Sesame Street: Numbers, Sewer Shark, Shadow: War of Succession, and Space Pirates.
Last time with the PS1, we entered September with NCAA GameBreaker, Project Horned Owl, Strike Point, and Bubble Bobble Featuring Rainbow Islands.
It’s a new year for us and the first anniversary of the PlayStation in North America, so let’s change things up a bit. Holiday season ’96 is when the game spigot really got opened and I’m having a harder time finding interesting things to say about most of these releases. I’m going to start using fewer words per game, unless it’s worth it, and I’ll start looking into getting more games covered per entry.
For now, let’s get through our scheduled batch of anniversary games by looking at Crash Bandicoot, Killing Zone, Die Hard Trilogy, and Impact Racing.
**This post was originally published on 2/19/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Crash Bandicoot
Developer: Naughty Dog
Publisher: SCEA
Release Date: 9/9/1996
Time to Not Having a Crash Bash: 2 Hours
Ok, look. I’m not gonna pretend you haven’t heard of Crash Bandicoot. Or, if you genuinely haven’t you should go do your homework or something instead of reading this. After their relative success with 1993’s Way of the Warrior, the boys at Naughty Dog shopped themselves to Universal and got enough funding to hire some employees, especially the CG guy from SeaQuest DSV, and tool around with a PlayStation devkit for a couple of years. Given the time and presence of professional adults, the team figured out a workable mascot concept and giroud shading on the PS1 hardware. SCEA liked what they saw of the resulting prototype and made the eventual game their opening shot of the 1996 fall line-up. It also came out on the console’s one year anniversary in North America, which I guess some marketing person was very proud of. Speaking of which, there’s probably a whole article to be written about the unhinged marketing campaign for this thing and the different approaches they took between the US and Japan releases, but that isn’t what we’re here for. Does Crash hold up as a video game?
No, it doesn’t. Not that it isn’t technically impressive in the context of the time. Naughty Dog was extremely concerned with draw distance issues and polygon limits, so the levels are designed with short sightlines and there are only a handful of polygonal models loaded on-screen at any time. Those constraints are combined with the need to make this a 3D platformer that utilizes the z-axis. The answer they went with was to have the player run down a linear path doing action-platformer stuff, except the view would be behind the back and the paths would be windy and allow for a little wiggle room. There are still some 2.5D levels and top-down boss fights, because there’s only so much you can do with this 3rd-person view concept. Still, designing around the technology in this way allows Crash to look as good as anyone had yet to accomplish on the system.
What kills the experience is interacting with the thing. The platforming design, while not as hateful as Rayman, fits the mold of asshole late 16-bit platformers In ways that aren’t flattering. The movement isn’t precise enough and the combat hitboxes don’t feel tight enough to respond to the demands of the levels. As a personal note, these are issues that will plague Naughty Dog for over a decade. For Crash specifically, the overly loose interaction contributes to many levels becoming trial-and-error memorization slogs in a way that is very much of its time. Those levels in themselves do the most to betray a lack of mature experience in level design. While there is a full variety of level types, including the trademark (complementary) front-facing-levels, the trademark (derogatory) back-facing levels, bad auto-scrollers, standard side-scrollers, and puzzle-challenge secret areas, the design is transparent and sometimes badly thought out in a way that is only one-step above amateurish.
In the end, playing this thing is kind of a hassle. Like, I’d rather go back to Clockwork Knight before touching Crash Bandicoot again. As successful as this was at the time, there are likely some of you reading this who think I’m being unfair. I’ll admit to being uncharitable, and I’ll tell you why. I can’t stand Crash Bandicoot as a mascot. The design evokes a specific kind of late 90’s stereotype that I don’t have patience for. Crash looks like huffed whatever he could get his hands on, listened to Limp Biskit, randomly broke stuff, would have committed sex crimes at Woodstock ’99 but didn’t have the money to go, and half his teeth probably fell out by the time he hit 30. Like, I couldn’t tell if the girl bandicoot who shows up in the secret levels is his girlfriend or his cousin, and I would buy it if you told me she’s both. Even without that association, the character design of this MODOK-ass motherfucker is mostly face, and it isn’t a face I ever want to see. I spent my childhood never once engaging with this franchise, and I have no regrets.
Yet, again, this is the most technically impressive game yet released on the PS1. The gameplay design, while middling, is still a step up from Naughty Dog’s previous output. The art is colorful with a distinct style, everything animates well, and the music works even if it isn’t my kind of thing. Though, its representation of Polynesian cultures is casually racist, but overall, it’s less racist than what these boys got up to in Way of the Warrior, so that’s growth of a kind; and they’re trending towards eventually not being dickheads. While playing this game, I thought “this sucks” more often than “this is ok”, so I won’t recommend it to anyone who didn’t already memorize the thing as a child. Even still, this is probably the third best platformer yet released on the PlayStation, which, oof.
Killing Zone
Developer: Scarab
Publisher: Acclaim
Release Date: 9/13/1996
Time to Beating The Game(?): 55 Minutes
How do you feel about C-tier 3D Fighting games? Ecstatic? Good, because that means you’re going to have a great time with the next several years of PS1 releases. The mid-90’s was an important transitional era for bottom tier Fighting games in that they spent a couple of years transitioning from bad Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat clones to bad Virtua Fighter or Toshinden clones. Though I guess Toshinden itself is a Virtua Fighter clone, but let’s not get into that. What we have with Killing Zone is an early adopter of the Toshinden Clone subgenre, brought to us by the minds behind the rightly forgotten Mortal Kombat clones Survival Arts and Battle Monsters.
This features a seven-character roster, one fewer than the ISO standard eight person roster for new fighting games, following a Universal Monsters motif because why not. Theres a man who turns into a werewolf using a special no sane person would ever discover, a skeleton, a minotaur, a T&A lady with stuff sticking out her head, a mummy, a gorgon, and Frankenstein’s monster. I personally mained the skeleton because it has a jumping down slash move where it transforms into a giant skull for no reason. Because this game is usually spoken of in the same breath as Criticom, any combat depth is obscure and wouldn’t work properly even if you found it. The fighting boils down to cheesing what can be cheesed and hoping for a ring out. This method can get you most of the way up the basic fight ladder before you get bored and return the disk to Blockbuster.
The one slightly interesting feature is the “Auto Mode”, which is a kind of autobattle mode where you pick a fighter and have their AI fight through a few tournaments. There are some character progression options and behavioral presets to adjust. I’m not sure how much those settings matter, and I played this mode through to completion. In fact, it’s the most fun you can have with this game because you get to watch the janky fight animations and AI without having to interact with it. That brings me to why I can’t bring myself to give Killing Zone the level of ire it deserves. Even though the character models are poorly constructed, the arenas are basic, and the music is barely passable, there’s something kinda charming about the sum total of the presentation.
Like, at the beginning of rounds the word “BATTLE” appears as a polygonal object in the arena before disappearing when the fighting starts. This is needless and takes up limited processing power that these developers clearly struggled to allocate properly. Also, the verbal sting from the announcer when the fight starts is unintelligible and I’m 60% sure he’s saying, “reach around!”, which is oddly considerate. The polygonal models themselves fit together poorly like this is a 32X game or something. They insisted on putting more textures on screen than they should, which probably caused more development problems than it solved, and they insisted on having these unhappy polygons go through detailed animations to try to give each fighter some personality and oomph. That effort is then punished by the AI being about as subpar as possible for a shipping Fighting game. It all comes together into a mess that I enjoy watching but not playing.
Die Hard Trilogy
Developer: Probe Entertainment
Publisher: Fox Interactive
Release Date: 9/15/1996
Time to Reading About Them In Time Magazine: 45 Minutes
In the debate around defining the greatest action movie of all time, I’ve always been a partisan for 1988’s Die Hard. It has the correct balance and pacing for character development, action, twists, and conflict escalation. It’s infinitely quotable, filled with memorable set pieces, and is the gold standard for a one-man-army action plot. The direction from John McTiernan (who is his whole own can of worms) is immaculate with Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman bringing some of the top performances in their very long careers, not even to mention the numerous great performances by the supporting cast. Alos, it started the tradition of media set during Christmas which isn’t about Christmas, a trope invention which in a way makes the first Yakuza game, among others, a direct spiritual descendant. What I’m getting at is I really like that movie. The 1990 sequel that Dies Harder is its own cheesy nonsense which doesn’t live up to the first but has its own fun, and ’95’s Die Hard With A Vengeance bounced back to be a great, if not classic, action thriller with good chemistry between Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. There have been no other Die Hard movies produced since then. No, shut up, I see you, there are only three Die Hard movies.
There were of course multiple tie-in video games for this franchise, the most notable of which are Sega’s Die Hard Arcade, which we’ll get to eventually, and this thing. Die Hard Trilogy was developed by the unsung workhorses at Probe, who seemingly treated this game as an afterthought for most of its development since they were putting their full effort into getting Alien Trilogy out the door. We already know that didn’t turn out as well as any of us would have wanted, so this is already a cause for concern when going into this release. Turns out this is the better game, but in an Alien vs. Predator kind of way. You see, the game is divided into three distinct subgames, one for each Die Hard movie, and each subgame uses a different gameplay genre to very different results.
Die Hard is represented by an almost isometric 3rd-person action game where you move John McClaine up through the floors of Nakotomi Plaza, starting at the parking garage and presumably ending on the roof. The floors tend to be intricate mazes with surprising levels of detail where you rescue hostages, defuse bombs, collect power-ups, and shoot hundreds of terrorists because Hans Gruber apparently brought an entire battalion with him in this retelling. The flow of gameplay is consistent with the kinds of top-down exploration-focused action games you would have seen on 16-bit platforms, except polygonal. This mode works well for what it is and if Probe had made the whole game in this style with some more mechanical variety thrown in this could have been considered alongside other 90’s licensed games whose quality rose above their station. Yet, this is only one third of the whole package.
Die harder gets the Light Gun treatment, very heavily inspired by Virtua Cop but not as competently designed. I personally think the environments look great for the time, especially when comparing it to Project Horned Owl, but the amateurish flow and encounter design stand out like a sore thumb, since it adheres to Virtua Cop‘s gameplay style closely enough to invite that unflattering comparison. Also, as usual, playing it with a d-pad is miserable but it’s probably a fine time if you’re in 1996 and have a guncon. I’ll keep having a hard time criticizing these also-ran Light Gun games on the PS1 until Time Crisis comes out.
Then there’s Die Hard With a Vengeance. Holy mother of crap, this part is unmitigated dogshit. They went with an open world driving game for this one, which would have been a severe development challenge for a team who knew what they were doing, and entirely untenable for Probe’s B-team in ’96. The idea is that you drive around an open world recreation of upper Manhattan completing various objectives like driving to various checkpoints on a time limit or chasing down other cars, also with a time limit. There are supposedly power-ups and better cars hidden around the map that you can pick up, but since you’re always on a short timer there’s no room for exploration. There also isn’t a level map, just a compass that indicates the general direction of the current objective. The driving sucks, the timer is about 20% shorter than it should be, the hitboxes are garbage, and the whole thing devolves into a miserable memorization game. Like, this is shockingly wretched when comparing it to the other two modes, and it seems like it was just as unpleasant to program, reportedly taking up most of the development resources on this project.
What we end up with is a mixed bag of a game in the literal sense. Nothing going on here is new or novel in any way that matters. The whole thing is half competent, but not in the sense of half the components of a cohesive whole being competent, I mean that half the actual content is competent, and the other half isn’t. As such, I’m not sure what to do with this thing. Then there’s the part where this was a heavily marketed release that received positive reviews at the time. Like, this wound up being one of Probe’s all-time best-selling games even though only a third of it would have been playable for most PlayStation owners. I’ll figure out somewhere to shove this in the rankings.
Impact Racing
Developer: Funcom Dublin
Publisher: JVC Musical Industries
Release Date: 9/15/1996
Time to My Eyes Glazing Over: 80 Minutes
We close off an eventful entry with one of those games that could be erased from existence, and no one would notice or lose anything of value. Aside from finding forgotten gems and insane nonsense, one of my goals for this project is to take a look at the shovelware dumped onto the PS1 that has all been memory-holed. These things have always existed on successful consoles to greater or lesser degrees and are forgotten by design. In these current days of digital distribution this kind of stuff is represented by 99-cent nothing games or weird scams, all of which are too low effort to be interesting. Yet, back in the day, shovelware had to be put together enough to justify disk pressing and distribution, which thus makes them substantial enough to consider. They also tended to take a while to see release on new consoles as install bases, prevalence of devkits, and industry technical experience had to reach a certain threshold to make these things viable. That’s why the NES, PS1, PS2, and Wii were the major shovelware platforms of their times, and why they eventually amassed four-digit game libraries. All of this is to say that I was weirdly excited to get my hands on some genuine mediocre garbage when I booted up Impact Racing.
And hoo boy, I wasn’t disappointed. This is a basic combat racing game throwing together old-school arcade lap timers and a mostly standard weapon system. There are a handful of modern-looking cars and like four maps that are reused three times each across the main campaign. The notable gimmick this thing leans on is a system where you have to get a certain number of car kills to unlock bonus stages, which if completed unlock new weapon types or power-ups. The kill counter carries over between races, so there is some sense of consistent progression in working towards a bonus stage over multiple races. Most of the weapons and hazards are standard, with a basic laser gun, mines, missiles, etc. But there is a hazard that you can run into which flips the screen upside-down and thus reverses the steering. That effect is a nightmare.
The cars don’t handle great, but not badly enough to be notable. The tracks are also not particularly inspired, and the AI is basic. Even the eurobeat soundtrack is actively mediocre. This thing isn’t graphically impressive, but at least the polygons aren’t constantly freaking out and it looks better than any of the 3DO racing games. These are really low bars, which is appropriate for the kind of game we’re dealing with. I also couldn’t find much of anything on Funcom Dublin, which is also something that I’m looking for in good shovelware. They were seemingly a bunch of brand-new game developers working under the Funcom umbrella who put out a few disposable PS1 racing games before getting closed down so Funcom could focus all of its financial resources into Anarchy Online. There is no moral to this story.
I know I said I was going to start using fewer words, but change is a process. Let’s move on to the Ranking of All PS1 Games.
1. Air Combat
…
32. Crash Bandicoot
47. Die Hard Trilogy
68. Impact Racing
109. Killing Zone
…
131. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time we’re warping back to the 3DO in 1994 with Space Shuttle, Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, The Incredible Machine, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
After that, we’ll continue vrooming our way through September ’96 on the PS1 by looking at Project Overkill, Ridge Racer Revolution, Casper, Burning Road, and NASCAR Racing. You might be thinking a potential top 5 game is on that list, but, uh, you’ll see.
You can find me streaming sometimes over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. Those streams have us looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I have going on, such as my effort to play through every PS1 JRPG.
I also randomly appear like a cryptid over on the Deep Listens podcast network. Be sure to check out their podcasts about obscure RPGs, real video games, old japanimation, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
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