An explanation of what we’re doing here can be found in the introduction post.
Last time, we went knee deep in PC ports released on the 3DO in 1994 by looking at Space Shuttle, Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, The Incredible Machine, and The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.
When we were last with the PS1, we closed out kicked off release season 1996 with Crash Bandicoot, Killing Zone, Die Hard Trilogy, and Impact Racing.
We now drive our way further into September ’96 by looking at Project Overkill, Ridge Racer Revolution, Casper, Burning Road, and NASCAR Racing.
**This post was originally published on 3/5/2025 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Project Overkill
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: 9/15/1996
Time to Being Remorseless: 30 Minutes
In September 1995, Origin Systems released Crusader: No Remorse for DOS computers. It was the result of a small team at the company repurposing Ultima VIII‘s weird isometric engine to create an action game. There’s a lot to say about Crusader, as with all of Origin’s games, and its immediate impact and popularity could even be credited with why so many PC games in the late 90’s used isometric perspectives. Though this discussion can wait until we get to its PS1 port. For our immediate purpose, we only need to know that the developers at Konami’s recently formed Chicago studio were big fans. So much so that they got a stripped-down knock-off out for the PS1 three whole months before the official port. That game is Project Overkill, which is all there is to say about it.
Ok, I can add a bit more. This is an isometric shooter with 8-way control using a d-pad and soft aim assist. The writing, visual design, and sound are generic edgy sci-fi nonsense without a distinctive personality; the only notable touch being the wet sound effects when you walk the character over bodies or pools of blood and the little bloody footprints you leave after doing so. I suppose this thing was supposed to be ultraviolent, but it isn’t over-the-top or gory enough to really register beyond the blood effects. It doesn’t help that the level design is dull, and the aiming has too little lock-on to work properly. Those problems with the movement and aiming make the combat feel clumsy and leads to a tedious kind of difficulty with ammo management. There are four characters to choose from with slight differences between them, and while you can change characters between levels, they die permanently, so in effect this gives you four lives for an entire run. That isn’t enough when factoring the other issues, so again it’s punishing in a weird way. The nicest thing I have to say about this game is that there’s a Starfox style branching path through the campaign, which would be neat if this was worth playing even once.
The most interesting part is that, as previously glossed over, this was made by Konami’s Chicago studio. Konami doesn’t have any American studios. Yet in the late 90’s they kept trying, first in Chicago, then Los Angeles, and eventually Honolulu, moving it closer to Japan with each iteration. These teams mostly just produced sports and bad handheld games, with Project Overkill being the first, and probably biggest, game produced by a Konami America studio. There’s a fun piece of trivia.
Ridge Racer Revolution
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Release Date: 9/10/1996?
Time to Finishing 2nd: 90 Minutes
This just made me sad. The PS1 port of the original Ridge Racer was a launch title and currently sits at #4 in the ranking of PS1 games. I don’t regret that ranking because it’s a good port of an all-time arcade racing game. Hell, in the time since writing that review, I bought a physical longbox copy of Ridge Racer and played the physical arcade cabinet at the last retro arcade in Akihabara. That game singlehandedly made me a partisan in the old Namco-Sega arcade war. Then, about two months ago, I came across a physical copy of Ridge Racer Revolution at a used game store and bought it on the spot. When I got home, I immediately played it, only to experience a mounting sense of dread and horror that chilled me to my core before I had even finished the first beginner race. That sensation came from an inescapable truth: this game is worse than the original.
That shouldn’t be the case. Revolution was made from the ground-up for the PS1, has a longer track, twice as many songs, several graphical improvements, a bunch of hidden extra content, better menus, and more extensive multiplayer. It’s Ridge Racer, only more so. But here’s the thing, it feels so much worse. That’s not even coming from rose-tinted glasses, I played these two games side-by-side and the original just feels worlds better to play.
As far as I can tell, the reason comes down to slight differences in handling and track design. The cars in Revolution don’t ease into corners quite as well and drifting is even more difficult than before, which wouldn’t be a deal breaker if not for the track. This new track is half as wide and features more and significantly sharper turns. Of note is the Mishima hairpin which seems designed put you into a wall no matter what. The third, and smallest, difference is that the opponent AI has been updated to be more aggressive, and by that, I mean they rubberband a bit more and will torpedo you. The handling, track, and AI have all been changed to make you go into the wall and slow down more often than in Ridge Racer, thus making it harder to win the races. The thing is, that first game balanced out to an ideal level of difficulty for an arcade racing game. With some practice and full concentration, you could beat the last race, which maxed the difficulty curve at requiring max effort and no further. That’s what makes a game good. In Revolution, these tweaks have skewed the entire curve upwards to the point where you need to go beyond that maximum level of effort to beat it, creating a less fair and more frustrating experience.
The course is only about 10 seconds longer, but Namco clearly wanted to pad out the game time by bumping the difficulty past the point of being fun and putting in hidden content that players could find out about in magazines. They basically went with the old Famicom strategy for making the game longer. This isn’t the 80’s, it’s the Fall of ’96 with Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, Tomb Raider, Wipeout XL, and Super Mario Frickin’ 64 on shelves showing that you can increase play time by having more content instead of (or in addition to in some cases) more bullshit.
One more complaint. While the visual detail has undeniably improved, there is noticeable seam-tearing in the polygonal environments and the cars are almost as unhappy about their existence as the ones in Sega’s botched Daytona USA Saturn port. They added more graphical bells and whistles but couldn’t make it stable, which makes this just another PS1 racing game in that regard.
Still, the one unimpeachable aspect of this game is the music. The first game had 6 tracks, which all fucked, and the sequel features 11, which all fuck harder than you have ever fucked or have ever been fucked. The reason I spent as much time playing this thing after the initial disappointment was because I wanted to do at least one race per song. Regardless of how good the soundtrack is on its own, the full impact is only felt when listening as part of gameplay. Hands down the best OST of ’96 without question.
The thing is, even with all my complaints, this is still like the third best racing game yet released for the PS1. It’s also probably the best of the games in this entry. This is a frustrating position to find myself, because I still have a video essay’s worth of nits to pick about this thing. This is genuinely upsetting for me. We have some hot garbage to look at next, so maybe that’ll calm me down.
Casper
Developer: Funcom
Publisher: Interplay
Release Date: 9/27/1996
Time to Calling The Ghostbusters: 35 Minutes
1995’s Casper is a bad movie. I saw it as a small child and even then, I thought it was lame. Apparently, Christina Ricci was a common childhood crush for guys a few years older than me, and that seems to be the only reason for people to have positive memories of this movie. We’re fortunate that this isn’t a movie review blog, but to our eternal dismay, this is a game review blog and Casper tie-in games were released on almost every platform in existence. That means we’re going to see this game two more times, and an eventual direct sequel to it.
The thing which must be noted first is that we’re in the middle of the era where companies would have different studios make different brand tie-in games for different platforms. In this case, DOS received a low-effort interactive storybook thing, Windows 95 got a basic point-and-click adventure game, the SNES saw an Absolute Entertainment developed sidescroller that’s like A Boy and his Blob except you play as the blob, Natsume developed a separate release for the Super Famicom that’s a weird isometric action-adventure game and also the Game Boy release that’s a bizarre minigame collection. Finally, the 32-bit console version from Funcom is an isometric adventure game. Yet, somehow, there wasn’t a Genesis or Jaguar version. Which is good, because this is too much Casper. These games are all bad in their own ways, though I guess the SFC version seems the most interesting.
As for what we have to deal with on 32-bit systems, well, it’s a boring slog. Yes, I see you saying that I’m a boring slog, Braden, and I will remind you that I can recognize my own kind. Again, Casper is a top-down adventure game where you float around a nonsensically laid-out haunted house looking for keys, items, and traversal abilities to unlock more of the house, all in order to collect two thingies in each chapter. There are three chapters, the puzzles are braindead, the item placement is random and obscure, and the enemy ghosts each hang out in one room each and only harass you while passing through. Even though there are only three chapters, each one can take from one to three hours depending on the amount of aimless wandering you do. There are also some kind of ghost points you get from picking up food which gets depleted when the other ghosts hit you, but I don’t think it matters for anything.
The plot seems to loosely follow that of the movie, but there’s extremely little writing and you can tell they super did not get likeness rights for any of the cast. The badly drawn, legally distinct character art is on par with how ugly everything else looks, especially Casper himself, and the sound design is as generic and low effort as you would assume. On the one hand, it seems like a baby’s first adventure game, but on the other hand everything in it feels so pointless, unexplained, and random that I doubt it could have held most children’s attention. There’s nothing to gain from this experience, and the movie sucks, so I say good riddance to this entire IP.
Burning Road
Developer: Toka
Publisher: Playmates Interactive
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Hydroplaning Across The Finish Line: 30 Minutes
I thought this was an arcade port when I first played it because it thoroughly knocks off the structure and gameplay of the big arcade racing games of the time. Turns out Burning Road was an original development chasing after the previous year’s console ports of Ridge Racer and Daytona USA. That’s how far this generation has come in only a year. None of this is to say it’s a good, or even competent, knock-off since the boys at Toka very clearly didn’t figure out how to make the act of driving in a video game feel any good.
The basic idea here is to take the early 90’s arcade racing format but with monster trucks and cartoonish kart racing adjacent tracks that have variable driving conditions. The environments would look nice if it weren’t for the aggressively bad pop-in and grainy textures or if the track design wasn’t obviously amateurish. They also did the thing you would do if you wanted to improve on the Ridge Racer formula but didn’t think about it too hard. Instead of the second and third tracks reusing sections of the previous tracks as a way to encourage players to build mastery and creating physical continuity, the three tracks here are all completely different in ways that don’t reinforce each other. This is fine in every other format of racing game, but not this kind.
Then there’s the driving model, which is confusingly terrible. The player vehicle tends to always fishtail into every turn while the AI vehicles don’t. This isn’t drifting, it’s more akin to hydroplaning into every turn. This puts the player at a severe disadvantage in handling when playing singleplayer for no comprehensible reason, and it makes the whole thing feel like a Mega Man ice level. Adding insult to injury, hitting a wall in a turn doesn’t bounce you back while slowing you down like in any of the competent arcade racers, but instead your truck will lock into 45-degree angle to the wall and skid the rear bumper along it before ejecting you at that angle, no matter how you hit the wall in the first place. That turns a near-parallel graze into a dive bomb towards the opposite wall. It all feels borderline unplayable.
The music is a whole other can of worms. By default, it’s butt-tier butt rock. Yet, a lot of effort went into recording unique voice stings for a variety of circumstances, even if the overbalanced “TIME EXTENSION” audio drives me insane after about ten minutes. Though there’s apparently a toggle in the option letting you switch to the PAL soundtrack, which, well, creates a whole separate vibe.
Between the overambitious production values, unfinished driving mechanics, and generally unhinged vibes, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Burning Road came from the same people who crapped out Adidas Power Soccer a couple of months earlier. While this game is better than that trainwreck, that’s saying almost nothing. Toka will go on to produce nonsense at a yearly clip before going under in 2001, so we can expect to randomly stumble across their game like a tripwire from now on.
NASCAR Racing
Developer: Papyrus Design Group
Publisher: Sierra Online
Release Date: 9/30/1996
Time to Rubbing Is Racing: 50 Minutes
We now get the first simulation racing game for the PS1, and I’m not sure what to make of it. NASCAR Racing is a port of the 1994 DOS game of the same name from Papyrus, who I will definitely get to in a bit, that is very unapologetic about not being meant for you. The audience consisted of either NASCAR fans who wanted a next gen game or grognards who somehow didn’t have a PC that could run it at the time. I’m somewhat fond of modern racing sims, so I think I’ve accidentally backed myself into that second group.
Being a licensed game, this thing features most of the real-world racetracks used for stock car racing in the mid-90’s and most of the driver likenesses. In practice that boils down to names on a lap sheet and the basic shape of the tracks. This is a toned-down version of a hardcore 90’s sim, and as such presentation was not the important part in development. This thing looks on par with Virtua Racing and has iffy audio design, but it doesn’t care. The simulation options are almost as extensive as what you would be able to find in Forza Motorsports ten years later, it has believable physics, car damage, and race rules. There is a level of effort with game options here that we have not yet seen on 32-bit systems, and the port job is good enough to make it effective.
Not that the simulation is without problems. Setting the Ai difficulty at 100% or above makes it seem like all the other cars have a secret higher gear that you can’t use, and the auto-braking assist is a disaster. It also doesn’t help that there aren’t any kind of career or tournament options, only single races. Also, even though it doesn’t matter much now, multiplayer is only done over a link cable, which would have been prohibitively restrictive. So, yeah, the point of NASCAR Racing was to be a stock car simulation, which it does to the detriment of everything else.
The real interesting part is the developer Papyrus Design Group. They spent the 90’s making licensed racing sims, almost entirely for PC, before going under in 2003. Yet, one of the studio’s cofounders bought all the source code at the bankruptcy auction and kept going with their sim engine from the last game they released, which coincidentally was NASCAR Racing 2003. He would start a new studio called FIRST.net and build out that code into a little game called iRacing. You know, the top tier racing sim that real life race car drivers use to practice and which has served as a pipeline from esports to motorsports. This game is an early ancestor of frickin’ iRacing and I can’t get over it. That’s going to make ranking it a bit challenging, on top of the all-or-nothing design ethos.
Well, this week had a lot of lifting-and-coasting and few brake checks when it came to quality. We’re at the end of September ’96, which means we’re two more posts away from being done with this stint looking at the PS1. Before that, though, we need to update the Ranking of All PS1 Games.
1. Air Combat
…
20. Ridge Racer Revolution
30. NASCAR Racing
65. Project Overkill
94. Burning Road
103. Casper
…
136. World Cup Golf: Professional Edition
Next time we take our final look at the 3DO’s 1994 catalog with Theme Park, VR Stalker, Waialae Country Club, Who Shot Johnny Rock?, and World Cup Golf.
After that, we’ll continue powering our way through the end-of-September gauntlet with MLB Pennant Race, Myst, NHL PowerPlay ’96, PGA Tour 97, and Power Rangers Zeo Full Tilt Pinball.
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, anime for old nerds, and sometimes sports!
You can watch the stream archives featuring these games below.
Fifth Generation Gaming 
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