An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time with the PS1 we closed out kicked off the second year of that console in North America with Crash Bandicoot, Killing Zone, Die Hard Trilogy, and Impact Racing.
When we last saw the 3DO, we saw what was definitely a collection of video games with Seal of the Pharoah, Sesame Street: Numbers, Sewer Shark, Shadow: War of Succession, and Space Pirates.
Now, we’re going to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by Capitalism, by looking at Space Shuttle, Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, The Incredible Machine, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
**This post was originally published on 2/26/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Space Shuttle
Developer: Amazing Media
Publisher: The Software Toolworks
Release Date: 1994
Time to Going Where Hundreds of People Have Gone Before: 30 Minutes
Ok, so I might have made a little whoopsie with this one, but in my defense it’s really hard to find information about this thing without actually playing it. Turns out this isn’t an old school shuttle simulator like I had assumed, but instead it’s a multimedia encyclopedia of NASA’s space shuttle program up through Mission 53 in 1992. It’s fairly comprehensive as such, with hella compressed audio and video snippets accompanying text descriptions of what space shuttles are, how they work, and what each mission did. The narrator sounds like the deep-voiced older guy who did a bunch of 90’s History channel VO, and the professional enunciation is helpful given the compression. The only interactive element is a turret shooting minigame where you shoot space junk. It’s boring and entirely pointless, adding nothing outside of allowing this thing to be categorized as a video game. This is also clearly a DOS port with an awkward mouse interface. Space Shuttle is nothing more than one of many multimedia edutainment oddities from the era, and I don’t even think I can rank it.
Star Control II
Developer: Toys For Bob
Publisher: Crystal Dynamics
Release Date: 1994
Time to Escaping Sol System: 35 Minutes
Now we get to the difficult part of this entry, these next four game are real-ass video games worthy of serious consideration…on the PC. It’s DOS ports all the way down today, and these next games were all significant as such, but should not be experienced on a 3DO for any reason whatsoever. Like, any household that could have afforded a 3DO back in ’94 would have also had a PC capable of playing any of these games, so what market would there have been for these 3DO ports? It boggles the mind. I’m here for weird, low-budget, misguided nonsense, not gaming classics on mismatched hardware. Speaking of which, here’s Star Control II.
Originally released in 1992 on PC, Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters was a hybrid of strategy, space sim, roleplaying, and top-down action gameplay that improved on the basics established by the frequently overlooked original Star Control in every way possible. Combining all of those gameplay elements with a mix of procedurally generated and handcrafted content to a high degree of aptitude earned this thing immediate and everlasting acclaim. If you’ve ever played a western developed space exploration sim of any kind, then you’ve played something that was inspired by this game. Eve Online is MMO Star Control, Mass Effect is linear Star Control, No Man’s Sky is Minecraft Star Control, etc. This is one of the most historically important PC games of the early 90’s, up there with Doom, Myst, Alone in the Dark, and Dune II.
Yet, because it is an early 90’s PC game, the damn thing is barely playable. Not as much on the technical end as you think, since GOG has bent over backwards for years to keep this thing running on modern systems, but in all the interface and mechanical ways you would expect. This is the era of grognard PC games where you read the manual thoroughly or go fuck yourself, and even then, you still probably can go fuck yourself. Getting anywhere in it to see all of the impressive stuff it does is a full commitment, which is outside the purview of this project, and I don’t wanna. This brings us to the ’94 3DO port.
Using a 3DO controller to play such a technical and complex PC game is as awkward as you would assume. In my time, I made it through the initial questline and was about to leave the Sol system before I decided I didn’t need to wrestle with this thing any longer. I would write off this version here and now if it weren’t for an extenuating factor. Because the original game is less than 30 Mb, Toys for Bob had room to add in a bunch of voiceovers and CG animations to this release, making it the most feature complete version of Star Control II. While that made it one of the best reviewed 3DO games of all time, that fortunately isn’t reason enough for anyone in this day and age to go play it. This version was eventually used as the basis for the open-source remake, just called The Ur-Quan Masters, that has been actively improved and continually rebuilt since 2003 and includes everything unique about this release. So, if you’re interested, go play that, it’s free.
I’ve now painted myself into a difficult corner. The original version of this game is historically important, and I might actually get stabbed if I bad mouth it. It’s also obnoxious DOS era grognard shit that I try to avoid. Add onto that the complication of the 3DO interface giving it a reason to not exist balanced against the updated content giving it a reason to exist. I mean, sure, it’s probably one of the best games on this system but I also don’t enjoy playing it, which I guess puts it in the same category as Super Street Fighter II Turbo but for opposite reasons. This dilemma won’t get any with the next three games, so let’s look at those.
Super Wing Commander
Developer: Origin Systems
Publisher: Origin Systems
Release Date: 1994
Time to Repeatedly Hitting An Asteroid: 50 Minutes
When Origin released Wing Commander in 1990, it was a transformative moment for PC gaming. The combination of a robust cast and branching plot along with some of the highest production values and best space combat yet seen raised the bar for everyone on immersion and reactivity in action games. While there had been notable space combat games in the 80’s, such as Elite, this game made it a serious genre and forced every big PC developer to respond in terms of writing and presentation. Maybe This even influenced the jump in technical and story sophistication of the above Star Control II. It quickly became a bigger deal commercially than Origin’s flagship Ultima series, a detail I find to be hilarious, leading to three acclaimed sequels and a terrible big budget Hollywood movie. The craziest part is that the original DOS version still kind of holds up. The animated sequences are of course outdated, but they still retain much of their charm, and the gameplay is still largely manageable with a minimum of grognardery. It’s important, playable, and usually available for almost nothing on GOG. Yet that’s not what we’re looking at today.
Super Wing Commander is the updated 3DO version released in 1994, probably a few months before Wing Commander III launched on PCs. Like with Star Control II, there was a ton of extra space on the CD that Origin utilized by updating the animated parts and filling it full of voice acting and CG cutscenes. Unlike SCII, the presentation changes in Super Wing Commander are kind of terrible. The VO is as bad as you would expect from early 90’s Origin and the CG is on par with other bad 3DO CG, both of which can be enjoyable in campier situations, but as a remaster it makes the experience worse.
The real crime is in the updates to the on-ship sections. These are the VGA pixel-art areas with crew members who you can talk to, all of whom are semi-static character portraits with some limited facial animations. Wing Commander is what popularized this storytelling method in the first place. Four years later Origin saw fit to update these screens to be more in-line with the current standard, Star Wars: Rebel Assault. This newer method involved a lot more animations on the facial drawings, so much so that it goes from being an interesting artistic convention to something horrifyingly stuck in the uncanny valley. By updating these sections, Origin made them into nightmare fuel. To cap off the technical failures here, the space combat itself received higher fidelity assets, but between the simplified UI, gamepad controls, and lower framerate, the gameplay itself kind of sucks. All of these changes make the presentation and experience worse for a four-year-old game that originally ran on frickin’ floppy disks.
This reviewed about as well at the time as Star Control II, but that just goes to show how little value new and shiny add-ons provide when they stop being new or shiny, especially when they’re implemented at the cost of other parts of the experience. Also, I looked up the manual and the damn thing didn’t even list the controls, just a bunch of Origin’s typical inane lore stuff. Maybe the experience of making this thing burned them enough to explain why, when porting Wing Commander III to consoles, it was a straight port with every keyboard function mapped onto a fully documented hyper-complex control configuration.
The Incredible Machine
Developer: Dynamix
Publisher: Dynamix
Release Date: 1994
Time to Being A Rat In A Treadmill Cage: 20 Minutes
I’m already turning into a broken record. This is a puzzle game which originally came out in 1993 for DOS as a small-time release that hit big due to its approachable but deep puzzle mechanics. It received critical acclaim, outsized sales success, and is regarded as a beloved and influential classic by everyone who played it. The 3DO port released a year later and sucks hot ass because of the abysmal interface. Between all these 3DO games, previous bad SNES PC ports, and the disastrous early PS1 PC ports that we’ve seen, I understand why there was a lot of trepidation from the old heads when developers finally figured out how to converge console and PC interfaces in the late 00’s.
The Incredible Machine has players use contraption-building mechanics to solve single screen engineering puzzles. You have a preset quantity and variety of rube goldberg contraption pieces (such as bowling balls, planks, rats on treadmills, fan belts, etc.) per level and you use those to cause some desired outcome. There’s like 80 levels which get increasingly complex to an eventually devious extent. This likely sounds familiar because just about every smartphone-based puzzle game released in the last 15 years cribbed from this game’s concepts and structure. While that makes it highly influential, that also means most modern players would look at the DOS version and come away whelmed; so many games have built on the ideas of this thing for so long that it’s no longer impressive. Yet, it’s still playable and you can get something out of it, and as always GOG has kept this game and its sequels as playable as possible for modern PCs.
The effort put into making the point-and-click interface of the original game work on a 3DO controller is wildly inadequate. This port uses an onscreen cursor that moves even slower than you would imagine, the submenu system is unintuitive, and the game’s simple logic programming is made more finicky than it should be. It feels bad enough to compromise the fundamental appeal of the original experience, which I suppose makes this a typical bad console port of a PC game. Maybe if I had any nostalgia or childhood memories of the DOS game or any of its sequels, I’d be more horrified at this butchering of a classic, but I don’t, so I’m not. More 3DO dreck for the dreck pile.
The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes
Developer: Mythos Software
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 1994
Time to Playing Dress-Up In Front Of A Green Screen: 30 Minutes
I have now gone insane. Not because of this game, but because I’m having to write the same thing for a fourth time in a row. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes was a VGA-ass point-and-click adventure game released for DOS PCs in 1992. The presentation was above average, and the writing went hard into Holmesian flavor in a way that still maintains its charm. It doesn’t seem like it had the most involved puzzles in the world, and it also seems to have only found mild success in a crowded adventure game market that was at the height of the VGA era. That leaves this game as only a mildly interesting footnote both of the era and in the annals of Sherlock Holmes video games.
For whatever reason, two years later EA published a port of this thing to the 3DO. Maybe they were digging deep into their recent catalog to find software they could throw at the floundering console, or maybe there was some other reason. The issues with this port are the same issues seen in all of the above. The d-pad cursor is sluggish and verb-click adventuring systems inherently don’t work with controllers. The answer this game finds to that second problem is to have the B button act as a catch-all command that will take the appropriate verb action with whatever you click on. That solves that problem, but this thing wasn’t designed to have a one-click system and so this streamlines the game out of the intended experience. From what I’ve read, the puzzle design was on the simpler side of the genre in the first place, so really all you’re playing this for is the writing and presentation; and boy is there writing and presentation in this game.
The original release leaned on decently well drawn VGA graphics, with unvoiced dialogue and small animated character portraits for speaking characters. It didn’t break any new ground, but it held up well enough in comparison to bigger name contemporaries like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Yet here’s the thing, in 1993 CD-ROMs and Myst obliterated that style of adventure game. So, while the 3DO was an ideal console for early CGI or FMV schlock, EA didn’t yet have one of those to throw on it. This issue of Sherlock Holmes being an obsolescent floppy disc game was solved by adding voiceovers and replacing the VGA character portraits with FMV inserts. The result is jarring to say the least and is worth gawking at for anyone interested in old video game bullshit.
I mean, the actors are all trying their best, but the fact they’re all standing in front of zoomed-in VGA assets, the cheapness of the costumes, and the inconsistent direction makes it look very slapped together. It doesn’t help that the original dialogue wasn’t written to be spoken out loud and there wasn’t an effort to edit the script to make it sound more natural. This makes the game more of an unhinged experience than it’s supposed to be, and that’s really the only reason I have to recommend looking at the 3DO version, but only for diehard adventure game nerds.
Though, The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes appears to be abandonware no matter the version, which means your options for playing it boil down to either torturing yourself with DOS Box or torturing yourself with this d-pad cursor. So, have fun, I guess?
Rating the four valid games in this entry is extremely tricky, since they’re all inferior versions of PC classics. Does a middling port of a good game go above or below a middling console exclusive? I don’t know, but we still need to update the Ranking Of All 3DO Games.
1. Guardian War
…
5. Star Control II
6. Super Wing Commander
13. The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes
21. The Incredible Machine
…
68. Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties
Next time, we’re racing back to the PS1 to look at Project Overkill, Ridge Racer Revolution, Casper, Burning Road, and NASCAR Racing.
When we next look at the 3DO we will finally reach the end of its 1994 releases by wishing for the sweet release of death as we look at Theme Park, VR Stalker, Waialae Country Club, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, World Cup Golf. Not all these games are playable!
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 weeb stuff, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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